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 parable
Below is a list of describing words for parable. 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 parable:
- plain and apt
- terrible and lurid
- weighty and interesting
- similarly diplomatic
- hideously apt
- impressive and instructive
- tentative spiritual
- wonderful and almost incomparable
- silent but solemn
- precious and matchless
- old sufi
- notorious faulknerian
- retro feminist
- huge mythological
- wonderfully sweet and beautiful
- solemn and yet charming
- ingenious commercial
- sublime and immortal
- brief but wonderfully realistic
- fanciful and delightful
- beautiful but difficult
- instructive and inspiring
- characteristic jewish
- wondrous, beautiful
- sad, small
- witty or humorous
- strange, bold
- lame and blind
- old burmese
- strictly true
- faulknerian
- little physiological
- striking and powerful
- beautiful and profound
- truly comprehensive
- almost incomparable
- profound ethical
- biblical and classical
- former little
- greatest agricultural
- mute but eloquent
- striking and impressive
- broad moral
- wonderfully realistic
- still happier
- fine political
- great prophetic
- intensely dramatic
- instructive little
- beautiful and striking
- strange fantastic
- seventh and last
- revelatory
- cognate
- great cosmic
- sweet and solemn
- bismarckian
- wonderfully sweet
- admirable little
- awful little
- mere poetic
- self-described
- already familiar
- cautionary
- sufi
- own terrible
- sweet and beautiful
- autobiographical
- instructive
- apt
- scathing
- grim little
- illustrative
- condensed
- outsized
- wicked little
- mendacious
- prophetic
- analogous
- much older
- biblical
- more complex
- pregnant
- sanitary
- scriptural
- ostrich
- dramatic
- puzzling
- evangelical
- such perfect
- matchless
- graphic
- trenchant
- perennial
- nuptial
- epicurean
- striking
- lurid
- ecological
- burmese
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
