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 perceptions
Below is a list of describing words for perceptions. 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 perceptions:
- initial erratic
- profound realistic
- subtle but amiable
- uncommonly apt
- keen underground
- keen and full
- violent sensory
- pure mystical
- sudden, snappy
- peculiar, hazy
- surprisingly complete and succinct
- keenly refined
- differential visual
- bureaucratic and popular
- previous subliminal
- unadulterated and almost instinctive
- astonishingly acute
- nice and acute
- own clearer
- robust aesthetic
- singularly clear-eyed
- unusual and unusually vivid
- excellent spatial
- contrary, accurate
- profound, maternal
- quick and refined
- intuitional and interpretative
- dormant and somewhat dull
- direct or simple
- sudden and almost alarming
- absolute quick
- necessarily vague and more
- seemingly intuitive
- fresh, painful
- exact aesthetic
- complete and succinct
- instinctive and infallible
- apparent sensory
- vague sensory
- just emotional
- fictitious, false and doubtful
- clear and selfless
- extremely broad and sensitive
- direct, unguided
- broad and sensitive
- vivid and sad
- idle and keen
- suddenly vivid and sad
- singularly clear and accurate
- delicate and exquisitely sensitive
- keener and spiritual
- tiny, unregistered
- attractive and internal
- originally acute
- romantic and artistical
- far-reaching, remote
- correct ethical
- transpatial and transtemporal
- appropriate spatial
- linear, personal
- quick grecian
- finite organical
- old sensorial
- unconscious, infinitesimal
- ever elegant
- complete and most pleasurable
- intellectual or sensual
- exquisite tactful
- miniature or little
- inwardly uncongenial
- direct and unclouded
- intuitive unerring
- habitual and vivid
- intense and almost philosophical
- pure, distinct
- true and partially false
- more, empirical
- indirect or scientific
- certain, awful
- human, intellectual
- distinct and almost intuitive
- wonderfully acute and sensitive
- evidently quick
- comic and other
- clear spatial
- reasonably cultured
- exquisite inner
- apparently intuitive
- excellent reptilian
- extra-sensory
- excellently quick
- orderly linear
- initial sensory
- odd and dizzying
- suddenly inadequate
- unique sensory
- keen but unsophisticated
- feeble but certain
- intangible, dreamlike
- unsuspecting, unenlightened
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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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