Describing Words
This tool helps you find adjectives for things that you're trying to describe. Also check out ReverseDictionary.org and RelatedWords.org.
Click words for definitions.
Words to Describe old man
Below is a list of describing words for old man. You can sort the descriptive words by uniqueness or commonness using the button above. Sorry if there's a few unusual suggestions! The algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job for most common nouns. Here's the list of words that can be used to describe old man:
- delicately frail
- sarcastic and talented
- intelligent and venerable
- wondrously evil
- upright stiff
- handsome and venerable
- dourly handsome
- bald and fat
- proud and feeble
- still militant
- bloated and gouty
- blind and depraved
- ordinarily unmoved
- benevolent and gallant
- sickly perverse
- unbelievably unkempt
- misguided but noble
- rigid and fanatical
- fat but healthy-looking
- insignificant and grizzled
- gentle and lighthearted
- wicked and disagreeable
- terribly gaunt
- savage and enlightened
- worldly cold
- profligate and illiterate
- decrepit and infirm
- boorish and decrepit
- decrepit and careworn
- sad and poverty-stricken
- powdered and courteous
- lonely worthless
- irritable and quick-tempered
- patriarchally respectable
- stiff and grizzled
- extremely horrid
- malignant and vicious
- stern and pale
- crazed and half-witted
- suddenly scornful
- covetous and stingy
- intrepid and brave
- clever and genial
- feeble and apprehensive
- self-indulgent and presumptuous
- desolate and grim
- rugged and grizzled
- wealthy and cheerful
- conscientious and rigorous
- cynical and quick-tempered
- morose and eccentric
- bulky and weary
- proud and weak
- respectable and much-respected
- straight and singular
- withered and feeble
- simple and talkative
- intrepid and bold
- rather hot-tempered
- admirable and good
- lonely hardworking
- stiff and arthritic
- deliciously dirty
- courtly charming
- malicious and tyrannical
- hesitant and pale
- grim and crabbed
- garrulous and good-hearted
- pathetically feeble
- eternally black-clad
- frail and withered
- fussy and feeble
- thin and grey
- venomously puritanical
- endlessly scornful
- incalculable and dangerous
- exceedingly decrepit
- thoroughly pickled
- specially wise
- incomparable and amiable
- deluded but grand
- tottering and decrepit
- exasperated and inexorable
- affable and lovable
- serene and strong
- bald and thin
- vastly busy
- impatient and testy
- gentle and bald
- decrepit and solitary
- cultured and good-natured
- soft and savage
- eagerly obliging
- decrepit but happy
- meekly inquiring
- ruggedly faithful
- feeble but sensuous
- violent and pragmatical
- gray and tremulous
- vehement but whimsical
Popular Searches
Describing Words
The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the "HasProperty" API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books!
Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files - mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.
Hopefully it's more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way - for example, gender is interesting: "woman" versus "man" and "boy" versus "girl". On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, "beautiful" is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world's literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for "woman" - too many to show here).
The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The "uniqueness" sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives' uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it's actually pretty simple). As you'd expect, you can click the "Sort By Usage Frequency" button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
