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 opinions
Below is a list of describing words for opinions. 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 opinions:
- respective and various
- no-nonsense personal
- galactic public
- vulgar and casual
- private and candid
- interested and inconsistent
- former, public
- astray public
- brave public
- enlightened public
- welcome outspoken
- conservatively poor
- obscenely unfavorable
- final declaratory
- extravagant and even monstrous
- perhaps bizarre
- trial much
- able dissenting
- severely public
- popular and unfortunately prevalent
- healthy public
- unbiased and unadulterated
- temporarily all-powerful
- heathenish and blasphemous
- strong but not conclusive
- ill nor unreasonable
- screwball medical
- all-american public
- political public
- intelligent public
- undisguised personal
- angry, pungent
- unreliable political
- sincere and probable
- ultra german
- ancient but incredible
- subjective and sometimes contradictory
- wrong public
- abominable and erroneous
- unanimous public
- wicked erroneous
- impious, unscriptural
- older and reactionary
- unsound and unwarrantable
- extremely reactionary
- penetrating public
- impatient public
- surely public
- shocking public
- concurrent good
- human, public
- tolerant public
- effeminate and flimsy
- german public
- correct public
- daily delicate
- strongly public
- forth well-known
- xenophobic public
- discordant and contrary
- deformed and misguided
- alike vain and uncertain
- false and favorable
- safe traditional
- universal and primary
- corrupt and popular
- staid and outmoded
- perhaps staid
- perhaps staid and outmoded
- civilian and neutral
- republican and progressive
- long preconceived
- finally public
- plausible academic
- foolish and sacrilegious
- preliminary false
- hearty public
- european public
- impious and criminal
- doubtful and useless
- precise or definite
- alert public
- immediate contemporary
- extremely opposite
- gradually public and political
- constant derogatory
- gradually public
- mysterious and absurd
- political and possibly unpopular
- inflammatory and liberal
- possibly unpopular
- quintessentially sophomoric
- paradoxical or whimsical
- bell--impartial
- identically erroneous
- loose and heretical
- sentimental public
- least, startling
- masterly dissenting
- --illiberal
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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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