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 pen

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

  • genial, interesting
  • filthy, foul-smelling
  • gladiatonal
  • fine-point black
  • thy irish
  • facile and eloquent
  • tenth, empty
  • hundred-odd female
  • fine-point disposable
  • satirical, merry
  • skilful judicious
  • practised and facile
  • deft and prolific
  • dull and rigid
  • clever, ready
  • unskilled, innocent
  • clever and versatile
  • thoughtful red
  • ready metrical
  • wide, thy
  • sober, agile
  • facile, easy
  • quick, prolific
  • talented, well-trained
  • chaste and truthful
  • feverish and versatile
  • coarse, mercenary
  • clever and implacable
  • thine antique
  • most sublime
  • feeble female
  • new scratchy
  • maximum federal
  • handsome gold-plated
  • clean federal
  • clever and fiery
  • fantastically heroic
  • rapt fastidious
  • practised and often picturesque
  • facile and fearless
  • burningly satiric
  • highly imaginative and powerful
  • ready but not pretentious
  • thy staggering
  • easy and prolific
  • trenchant and witty
  • cynical, virulent
  • same super-royal
  • acrid and irresponsible
  • quaint clever
  • reasonably shrewd
  • slippery and intriguing
  • graceful and prolific
  • facile and congenial
  • incisive, ready
  • own loquacious
  • lavender plumed
  • ready and amusing
  • rebellious and heavy
  • feeble but impartial
  • facile expeditious
  • steady and compact
  • sufficiently fecund
  • fluent and indefatigable
  • ready, punctual
  • brave and facile
  • sympathetic and facile
  • caustic and daring
  • wondrous poor
  • coarse and well-fortified
  • long-shanked, awkward
  • busy and graceful
  • indomitable and powerful
  • singularly brilliant and facile
  • ingenious and versatile
  • inexperienced editorial
  • enthralled little
  • characteristic full-page
  • glad and inspiring
  • ever glad and inspiring
  • ready and prolific
  • unable and unworthy
  • facile and impartial
  • rude fenced
  • vigorous, irresistible
  • gossipy but graphic
  • graceful and graphic
  • still active and influential
  • unpartisan and independent
  • sharpest, kindest
  • conscious clever
  • facile and unrestrained
  • finest spencerian
  • able and sharp
  • able and poetic
  • skilful, judicious
  • pleasant and facile
  • unequal, risky
  • ready and subtle
  • graceful nimble

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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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