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 operation
Below is a list of describing words for operation. 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 operation:
- literary caesarean
- whole routine
- patently unauthorized
- minor and inconclusive
- routine mathematical
- probably subconscious
- subtle and probably subconscious
- single three-day
- clandestine, personal
- mysterious dental
- fatal surgical
- nice profitable
- necessary but most delicate
- admirable and intricate
- inordinately difficult
- long-term continuous
- crisp and easy
- difficult unpleasant
- watchful and auxiliary
- practical and unlimited
- general infinitesimal
- big clean-up
- politico-sentimental
- large space-based
- indirect negative
- general and almost constant
- gradual and perhaps unobserved
- perhaps unobserved
- sickeningly painful
- long-term, iffy
- unrestrained and free
- indirect and consequential
- extraordinary surgical
- dangerous surgical
- difficult surgical
- essentially nineteenth-century
- pure kindred
- original kindred
- initial clandestine
- marvelously skillful
- long and marvelously skillful
- infinitely riskier
- disgusting minor
- conceivable surgical
- tardy, ineffectual
- small in-office
- whole preventative
- half-baked and slipshod
- defective or injurious
- painful surgical
- one-man and automatic
- joint peacekeeping
- single intensive
- regular black-market
- tranquil and purely pleasurable
- greatest amphibious
- regular chemical
- entire logical
- whole farcical
- uninteresting but practical
- skillful military
- recent corrective
- elementary and vital
- painstaking and bruising
- tricky and definitely dangerous
- conspicuously sane
- slick money-making
- precarious and time-consuming
- highly precarious and time-consuming
- original or difficult
- severe surgical
- direct belligerent
- natural and not superfluous
- simple and almost painless
- frightful surgical
- trifling but most important
- desperate surgical
- unprecedented and wonderfully successful
- adverse or competitive
- boldest and most difficult
- painless but very scientific
- anti-patriarchal
- ordinary lateral
- beautiful and unhindered
- perilous surgical
- disobedient and irregular
- mechanico-mental
- burdensome and often expensive
- proper and uninterrupted
- other intentional
- especially full and suggestive
- difficult and very gradual
- painful and lengthy
- petty surgical
- useful eugenic
- impending military
- normal technical
- classically neat
- criminally vindictive
- purely profit-making
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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