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 paths
Below is a list of describing words for paths. 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 paths:
- normal asteroidal
- yon straight
- hopeless individual
- narrow but infinitely long
- preferred awful
- direct, safe
- few interspatial
- clear, well-lighted
- blind and tortuous
- difficult and stony
- straight and luminous
- ciously convenient
- irregular, treacherous
- paved wide
- often mundane
- devious woodland
- safe but long
- devious and impracticable
- reasonably safe but long
- lengthy circuitous
- steep, insane
- straight and painful
- unreasonably convoluted
- strange, unmathematical
- sovereign voluntary
- ready and plain
- rough and almost impassable
- straight and narrow
- endless, thorny
- deliberately circuitous
- down philosophical
- sheer brief
- long kidney-shaped
- precipitous and dangerous
- sometimes weird and dangerous
- hollow and somewhat steep
- various and crooked
- plain and straight
- right-handed and decent
- least abrupt
- narrow animal
- steep and thorny
- easiest or quickest
- excruciatingly steep
- purposeless and listless
- twisty steep
- dark and different
- stony, slippery
- difficult and obsolete
- steep and somewhat greasy
- public and perilous
- circuitous coastal
- other, straighter
- erratic, sloppy
- erratic and eccentric
- tortuous, ticklish
- negotiable natural
- extremely long and dangerous
- devious and beautifully variegated
- infallible and easy
- disadvantageous and dangerous
- internally curved
- perpendicular narrow
- rough but straight
- single circuitous
- comparatively rapid and extensive
- black, downward
- indescribably perilous
- bold short
- evil and stony
- unattainably lofty
- faint stony
- ghastly bridal
- prim, right-angled
- simple and relatively direct
- baffling spiral
- safe and almost instantaneous
- steady random
- carefully random
- secret and gloomy
- circuitous and pleasant
- wild and innumerable
- monotonous and strangely fascinating
- dismally wide
- silent and toilsome
- several woodland
- tortuous rocky
- safe or dangerous
- peaceful red
- silent scented
- dark and sinistral
- crooked and violent
- totally undefined
- cortico-spinal centripetal
- dreary and cruel
- seasonal rhythmic
- tortuous spiral
- incredibly rocky
- straight practical
- undisturbed, delightful
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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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