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 one
Below is a list of describing words for one. 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 one:
- important golden
- now dead and several
- capricious fair
- unknown fair
- quick, formalized
- uncommon or impressive
- cruel fair
- roughest, cruelest
- profound or important
- simple and purely physical
- nice-looking younger
- degraded and wicked
- significantly cautious and non-committal
- significantly cautious
- graceful posterior
- expensive crooked
- mere electro-chemical
- current larger
- provost-marshal late
- braver, little
- normal unnatural
- fairly simple and direct
- pristine, untouchable
- dirty, evil and sexual
- true and tempting
- strange and somewhat frightening
- frightening or dangerous
- hopeful or happy
- rocky grievous
- smaller and nastier
- large and personal
- narrow or low
- officious and venial
- treacherous and lucky
- lustful and stupid
- irreverent and irrelevant
- luckiest stupid
- larger but equally sterile
- dull but dutiful
- arbitrary or unlimited
- whole or handsome
- complex and so different
- decent soft
- steadfast and affectionate
- unobvious but major
- sweeter and healthier
- tall, uglier
- dismal rear
- hilarious and joyous
- simple and terminal
- brief and good
- universal and unimpeachable
- modern fair
- popular and misleading
- morbid, mournful
- insane and hopeless
- obscure and austere
- similar modest
- new or secret
- successful, royal
- fully awake and active
- potentially reckless or careless
- potentially reckless
- new and intensely unfamiliar
- many, seeming
- ripe and good
- hard but superfluous
- indignant fair
- silent scornful
- beloved fair
- elemental and practical
- difficult and possibly insoluble
- mysterious unmarked
- foolish and harmless
- smaller and friendlier
- profound limp
- lean, black-robed
- agreeable, humble
- possible and logical
- combative uncompromising
- old-time indecisive
- banal lyric
- tan compact
- spare usable
- small and theoretically unimportant
- big, well-stocked
- deep envious
- arid and dismal
- remunerative, worth
- voiceless, inarticulate
- purely unknown and imaginary
- purely unknown
- indian civilian
- temporary and destructive
- young false
- sylvan, peaceful
- nearest and smallest
- busy and quiet
- own tougher
- massive and persistent
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.
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