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 origin
Below is a list of describing words for origin. 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 origin:
- artificial, extraterrestrial
- hebraic or similar
- possible vocal
- apparent intelligent
- earth-historical
- low and plebeian
- secret and unscientific
- sometime shameful
- odd and sometime shameful
- evidently crystalline
- apparent italian
- real but not traceable
- modest irish
- natural, aesthetic
- possibly germanic
- separate but similar
- valid nonsupernatural
- foreign and even barbarous
- servile and humiliating
- obscure and servile
- genuine ethnic
- obvious planetary
- immediate pantomimic
- probable gestural
- supernatural or even divine
- ultimate nomadic
- recent and scientific
- elective and popular
- extracolonial
- subsequent and comparatively recent
- kindred, common
- pure santal
- remote and purely pagan
- south-continental
- local and fairly recent
- probable totemic
- natural or purely human
- interjectional or imitative
- partly teutonic
- atavistic and pathological
- exclusively pecuniary
- lamentably low and doubtful
- world--geologically recent
- unmistakably organic
- sinister and disastrous
- dragon--theological
- suspiciously british
- religious romantic
- astute and mercenary
- hispanic
- high, religious
- possible psychosomatic
- aboriginal or aztec
- nonimperial
- more, mysterious
- water--magical
- constitutional and mechanical
- astrological and solar
- noble or romantic
- distinct and abnormal
- hardy swedish
- osseous or synovial
- bigerminal
- free and criminal
- troubled historical
- sacerdotal but popular
- --traditional
- equally primeval
- remote but common
- divine and not human
- similar freshwater
- mechanical and derivative
- organic and freshwater
- probably non-aryan
- unquestioned celtic
- fantastic classical
- foreign and prosaic
- recent and definitely historical
- northern and celtic
- celtic or other
- foreign and oriental
- foreign, obscure
- uncertain or accidental
- sudden and collective
- independent empirical
- ours--natural
- modern and chemical
- prosaic but probable
- supernatural or natural
- yellow racial
- admittedly human
- unmistakably ancient
- sextupedal
- remote and somewhat classical
- single or peculiar
- double and illegitimate
- remote or deep
- extra-limital
- partial volcanic
- purely volcanic
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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