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 passages
Below is a list of describing words for passages. 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 passages:
- entirely symbolic
- wild, elfin
- slippery and precarious
- low-lying, windowless
- shallow reedy
- verbatim long
- tentative, gaudy
- main and alternate
- salient safe
- dreary but clean
- rare and laborious
- remarkable and secret
- apparent dead-end
- imaginative or domestic
- admirable and ornamental
- deep nether
- muddy animal
- fearful baptismal
- pregnant and beautiful
- short but eminently characteristic
- finest descriptive
- dreary, dim
- however intricate
- rapid or straight
- fine and humorous
- out-of-the-way and empty
- mad covetous
- nonexistent secret
- parallel and illustrative
- straightforward and serene
- also swampy
- relatively straightforward and serene
- remarkable and personal
- narrow but very long
- puzzling and important
- peri-astral
- verbal parallel
- ingenious, short
- practicable and navigable
- soft and merciful
- uncomfortable, laden
- transcendental symbolic
- comparatively long and dark
- inflexible syntactic
- dry subterranean
- deep descriptive
- inconceivably eerie
- incorporating long
- oblique and practicable
- sadly romantic
- quick and prosperous
- partly parallel
- dirty, dim
- delightful and uneventful
- exquisite and illuminating
- narrow subterranean
- short, arched
- intermittent alternate
- rather scenic
- nasal and glottal
- magnificent quick
- long transitional
- unfortunately one-way
- rapidly boring
- spurious new
- similar textual
- quick, infinite
- perilous southern
- towering and dark
- least key
- interminable grey
- scientific, military and philosophical
- impending and dangerous
- military and philosophical
- shortest musical
- modern such
- dazzling but capricious
- difficult or obscure
- infinitely pregnant
- imaginative and rhetorical
- interesting and most memorable
- striking and rhetorical
- safe, swift
- crabbed and bombastic
- private narrow
- fight--scriptural
- brief and speedy
- such detachable
- longed-for western
- rapid octave
- long but very important
- choral and concerted
- convenient or even practicable
- happy declamatory
- singular and very obscure
- healthy nasal
- significantly decisive
- descriptive and romantic
- dark and suggestive
- minor and frequent
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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