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 pathos
Below is a list of describing words for pathos. 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 pathos:
- gentle and dramatic
- rough or violent
- fancy and deep
- rugged, careworn
- artless, indescribable
- distinct and most exquisite
- sadder and sadder
- sweet sincere
- descriptive simple
- impure and material
- quizzical mock
- admirable wild
- mild and philosophic
- absurd, sweet
- vague and sterile
- false, disturbing
- sacred and severe
- fine poignant
- indescribable and thrilling
- sorrowful, humble
- deep and haunting
- oriental, occidental
- passionate, impassioned
- swift subtle
- endless and wistful
- futile, ironical
- poignant and somewhat humbling
- deep and very human
- rarer, subtler
- thrilling and persistent
- adventitious but intimate
- grave and wistful
- sensuously sentimental
- melancholy elegiac
- robust, synthetic
- sensitive, haunting
- intense and gallant
- funny, shy
- poignant and passionate
- delicate, penetrating
- thrilling and almost awful
- diffuse and loud
- fundamental and tragic
- vague, barren
- revolting and hideous
- perchance deeper
- grotesque appealing
- poetical and military
- noble, penetrating
- keen, transitory
- pleasant self-congratulatory
- facile, maudlin
- sad dramatic
- distinct and terrible
- wistful, inexpressible
- haunting and indescribable
- decorous but ineffective
- stern, tragic
- quiet, wind-blown
- whimsical, bitter
- rough and noble
- sweet and meaningful
- real but sublime
- elusive and wistful
- due rhetorical
- natural and thoroughly unsophisticated
- infinite mournful
- fine and human
- peculiarly fine and human
- individual and deeper
- peculiar and deep
- supernal religious
- sweet and almost divine
- humorous, faint
- irresistible and solemn
- penetrating and indefinable
- strong incisive
- deep, ineffable
- simple, dreary
- same heart-rending
- simple and lofty
- lush and morbid
- somewhat humbling
- highest and most terrible
- indefinable and exquisite
- immense, terrible
- icefirth--ironical
- abstract, sentimental
- slight, fantastic
- deep and appealing
- weird and quaint
- oftentimes deep
- simple but infinite
- brief and profound
- vague barren
- shadowy celtic
- sombre and thrilling
- strange dreary
- thoroughly unsophisticated
- least unsuccessful
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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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