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 outburst

Below is a list of describing words for outburst. 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 outburst:

  • initial and genuine
  • interested, soft
  • demoniac ironic
  • customarily wild
  • spontaneous general
  • wild, blasphemous
  • still noisier
  • natural and vehement
  • frank and involuntary
  • piteous desperate
  • audible and genuine
  • unjust and unexpected
  • general indignant
  • terrific, appalling
  • ciceronian, declamatory
  • metallic, sonorous
  • childish mental
  • apparently vehement
  • unexpected, uncharacteristic
  • short, oblique
  • inscrutable lyric
  • unexpected and fitful
  • emotional, lyrical
  • passionate, eloquent
  • belated sexual
  • good-natured and almost childish
  • present malicious
  • feeble and incidental
  • involuntary, irrepressible
  • sudden irregular
  • fierce, muscular
  • passionate, tempestuous
  • unexpected and uncharacteristic
  • horrific and treasonous
  • emotional but ineffective
  • ill-mannered, shameful
  • recent deranged
  • queer hysterical
  • simple recurrent
  • quaintly pessimistic
  • preternatural convulsive
  • sudden vociferous
  • occasional but mighty
  • unusually feverish
  • steady, splendid
  • next intermittent
  • wild, homesick
  • rude spontaneous
  • furious and theatrical
  • little, effusive
  • thoughtlessly noisy
  • loud, irresponsible
  • genuine present
  • next impetuous
  • enthusiastic and glorious
  • emotional and loving
  • genuine and involuntary
  • boyish but honest
  • previous impulsive
  • next remorseful
  • degradingly ill-mannered
  • sudden hospitable
  • brief and almost unprecedented
  • same demographic
  • disordered and wild
  • awful, raucous
  • unparalleled forensic
  • mere incessant
  • nervous tremulous
  • mad wicked
  • headstrong, destructive
  • splendid spontaneous
  • severe and wholly unwarranted
  • peculiarly heart-rending
  • emotional and acrobatic
  • great satanical
  • everyday volcanic
  • splendid but mischievous
  • rather polemical
  • spontaneous elemental
  • mighty explanatory
  • big, spontaneous
  • faint but spontaneous
  • passionate and real
  • recent candid
  • simultaneous, thunderous
  • momentary and unaccountable
  • sentimental and too extravagant
  • impassioned, heart-rending
  • whooping, vehement
  • angry and almost terrible
  • sudden paternal
  • impetuous and childlike
  • genuine and unpremeditated
  • vehement and natural
  • spontaneous and warm-hearted
  • whole emphatic
  • youthful, wild
  • literary and prophetic
  • petulant rhetorical

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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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