Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 woman

Below is a list of describing words for old woman. 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 woman:

  • distressingly ancient
  • squat and dumpy
  • dismal and lonesome
  • insanely suicidal
  • hypothetically nonmenopausal
  • almost well-dressed
  • good-natured but gloomy
  • blind and poor
  • withered and bitter
  • egregiously fat
  • crazy and uncanny
  • harsh and hardy
  • unnaturally lusty
  • frivolous and garrulous
  • perhaps sorrowful
  • selfish and rich
  • fat and hearty
  • extraordinarily dirty
  • rheumatic and crooked
  • sick and cruel
  • gray and ragged
  • fanatically acquisitive
  • senile and greedy
  • fat and sentimental
  • tiny and ancient
  • nonmenopausal
  • totally toothless
  • relentlessly self-sufficient
  • tremendously frail
  • exceptionally invaluable
  • healthy and placid
  • unwieldy and wearisome
  • wonderful and grim
  • masculine and severe
  • childless and penniless
  • wrinkled and red-cheeked
  • worn-out and perplexed
  • querulously grateful
  • ugly overdressed
  • terribly stingy
  • gray-haired and toothless
  • wrinkled and toothless
  • lonely defenseless
  • ludicrous and indelicate
  • turbulent and odd
  • horribly shrewd
  • miserable and decrepit
  • short or deformed
  • hateful and malicious
  • silly mere
  • ragged and crooked
  • crazy and drunken
  • fat and helpless
  • tyrannical and bigoted
  • mildly eccentric
  • gnarled and leathery
  • >insanely suicidal
  • foolish and vulnerable
  • voluble and rude
  • somewhat doddering
  • appallingly clean
  • small and bright-eyed
  • mostly defenseless
  • truly obstinate
  • terribly wise
  • feeble and sick
  • awkwardly obstinate
  • suspicious and inquisitive
  • preternaturally plausible
  • impatient and self-willed
  • vulgar and revolting
  • sad and wise
  • respectable and severe
  • slim and slender
  • silly stout
  • eminently unpleasant
  • polite and harmless
  • ugly dried-up
  • quite poetical
  • exceedingly garrulous
  • tiresome and pitiful
  • dishonest nor evil-minded
  • bulky and untidy
  • wrinkled and severe-looking
  • delightfully wicked
  • unusually tiresome
  • stupid and credulous
  • childlike or childish
  • queer and unexplained
  • plain and neat
  • strangely eloquent
  • brave and tough
  • hys­terical
  • deeply repentant
  • poor but enthusiastic
  • handsome and wise
  • yon dreadful
  • thin but sturdy
  • bedridden
  • terribly practical

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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.

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