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 oversight
Below is a list of describing words for oversight. 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 oversight:
- fundamental and perplexing
- unsympathetic, alien
- catch--fatal
- small but appalling
- constant and perhaps jealous
- slight theoretical
- wise eternal
- strange and very great
- enlightened general
- parental and religious
- reprehensible editorial
- traditional expensive
- unlucky clerical
- ar�chitectural
- understandable but quite dangerous
- unfortunate technical
- congressional or departmental
- grotesque divine
- systematic and constant
- crass and insensitive
- energetic personal
- inward watchful
- cruel and inexcusably careless
- adequate and sympathetic
- general careful
- apparently idiotic
- perhaps jealous
- serious educational
- greater governmental
- inexplicable grammatical
- on-site ethical
- simple, dumb
- substantial external
- usual congressional
- corrupt federal
- inexcusably careless
- able personal
- human, moral
- careful religious
- usual pastoral
- constant and efficient
- systematic religious
- respective congressional
- rather major
- highly unfortunate
- simple bureaucratic
- quite unforgivable
- foolish and unaccountable
- watchful, loving
- truly criminal
- seemingly absolute
- constant real-time
- intelligent and gentle
- highly reprehensible
- effective british
- proper parental
- minimal human
- general imperial
- least formal
- regulatory
- great and complete
- careful and continuous
- same judicious
- semi-paternal
- less vigilant
- rather trivial
- strict social
- strategic or tactical
- active and vigilant
- direct human
- quite dangerous
- far stricter
- faithful and intelligent
- ad-hoc
- sufficient internal
- direct imperial
- apparently slight
- own vigorous
- congressional
- more authoritative
- inexcusable
- own careful
- such awkward
- unaccountable
- _spiritual
- rather careless
- unintentional
- quaint old-fashioned
- same careful
- rather grave
- supervisory
- other grave
- such faithful
- perfectly understandable
- egregious
- much careful
- purely technical
- more unfortunate
- regrettable
- parliamentary
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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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