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 perception
Below is a list of describing words for perception. 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 perception:
- initial erratic
- profound realistic
- subtle but amiable
- uncommonly apt
- keen underground
- keen and full
- pure mystical
- peculiar, hazy
- surprisingly complete and succinct
- keenly refined
- differential visual
- previous subliminal
- astonishingly acute
- own clearer
- robust aesthetic
- singularly clear-eyed
- excellent spatial
- profound, maternal
- intuitional and interpretative
- direct or simple
- absolute quick
- necessarily vague and more
- seemingly intuitive
- fresh, painful
- exact aesthetic
- complete and succinct
- instinctive and infallible
- apparent sensory
- just emotional
- clear and selfless
- direct, unguided
- vivid and sad
- suddenly vivid and sad
- delicate and exquisitely sensitive
- tiny, unregistered
- originally acute
- far-reaching, remote
- transpatial and transtemporal
- linear, personal
- finite organical
- unconscious, infinitesimal
- complete and most pleasurable
- exquisite tactful
- inwardly uncongenial
- intuitive unerring
- intense and almost philosophical
- true and partially false
- indirect or scientific
- certain, awful
- human, intellectual
- distinct and almost intuitive
- wonderfully acute and sensitive
- evidently quick
- clear spatial
- reasonably cultured
- exquisite inner
- apparently intuitive
- extra-sensory
- orderly linear
- odd and dizzying
- unique sensory
- feeble but certain
- unsuspecting, unenlightened
- verbal, numerical and spatial
- acute, unusual
- derma-optical
- extra-nasal
- trams-spatial
- absolute trams-spatial
- intense and highly aesthetic
- primary all-inclusive
- evident acute
- strong, discerning
- spotless and sublime
- alertly critical
- seeming certain
- mystical poetical
- clear intuitive
- sensitively keen
- instinctive or experimental
- clear and lawful
- seeming quick
- bare ethical
- direct but indefinite
- ordinary valid
- real valid
- keenest natural
- fresher and keener
- keen and supernatural
- nearer pure
- acute or dramatic
- quick analytic
- superior, definitive
- accurate and entire
- dim but sure
- balefully exact
- strange and profoundly mystic
- intuitional and psychical
- boundlessly whimsical
- philosophical and cordial
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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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