Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 peculiarity

Below is a list of describing words for peculiarity. 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 peculiarity:

  • striking but mournful
  • broad and somewhat desolate
  • same snake-like
  • striking racial
  • astounding biological
  • other, lesser-known
  • bizarre, disquieting
  • strangest constitutional
  • same autonomous
  • extraordinary severe
  • inborn national
  • grand unparalleled
  • bygone mental
  • mere congenital
  • material or artistic
  • locally chemical
  • same caudal
  • bizarre disquieting
  • generic physiological
  • scarcely notable
  • generally noticeable
  • sole pleasing
  • least idiomatic
  • strange and very interesting
  • bald caustic
  • innate idiosyncratic
  • personal or constitutional
  • remarkable morphological
  • lucrative but uncomfortable
  • fancy and national
  • remarkable rhythmical
  • slight and undetermined
  • mere grecian
  • advantageous special
  • special or personal
  • radical and powerful
  • subtle, nameless
  • palpable psychological
  • curious and not unimportant
  • special, distinct
  • characteristic linguistic
  • solitary and crowning
  • characteristic vertebrate
  • singular organic
  • interesting and invaluable
  • remarkable ethnological
  • congenital racial
  • destructive and disagreeable
  • small typographical
  • curious and old-fashioned
  • subordinate anomalous
  • simplest physical
  • curious phonetic
  • grotesquely painful
  • somewhat revolting
  • natural or other
  • damned agreeable
  • strange constitutional
  • singular and sad
  • steady and unchanging
  • grand and distinctive
  • sufficient explanatory
  • rare and pleasing
  • personal poetic
  • other and final
  • strange and humiliating
  • great and distinctive
  • psychological and political
  • dark and wild
  • same rotational
  • unfortunate mental
  • curious sexual
  • such facial
  • curious individual
  • singular architectural
  • last distinctive
  • presumably favorable
  • stern and dreadful
  • least striking
  • somewhat desolate
  • curious tropical
  • separate and unique
  • sinister and grotesque
  • special
  • otherwise puzzling
  • well-known domestic
  • french or irish
  • other electoral
  • singular and fortunate
  • chief apparent
  • organic sexual
  • remarkable physiological
  • unique religious
  • other noticeable
  • essential physical
  • noticeable physical
  • greatest external
  • little medieval
  • national or provincial
  • local or provincial

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.

Recent Queries