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 person

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

  • selfish or foolish
  • solemnly deliberate
  • sophisticated knowledgeable
  • thin and very agile
  • immediately annoying
  • naive and humble
  • curiously naive and humble
  • truly intelligent or magical
  • strong and responsible
  • cool, contemplative
  • fundamentally good-hearted
  • fluffy, blue-eyed
  • crafty evil
  • gay serious
  • rather uncertain and elusive
  • uncertain and elusive
  • stolidly respectable
  • courageous, nobler
  • commonly gifted
  • insignificant and helpless
  • malicious, vindictive
  • clean-shaven, silent
  • buxom and cheerful
  • bustling and genial
  • gnarled, dried-up
  • relatively ethical
  • sane and well-adjusted
  • slight and agile
  • distant, self-contained
  • token sane
  • innocent and hospitable
  • spotlessly pure and innocent
  • sufficiently crooked
  • able but poor
  • inordinately selfish
  • perverse or refractory
  • naturally diplomatic
  • frail, youngish
  • never harmful or destructive
  • never harmful
  • enormously selfish
  • single, well-known
  • impartial but prestigious
  • feckless, trivial
  • mildly objectionable
  • amiable and complacent
  • noble, ducal
  • proud or haughty
  • essentially common
  • handsome or otherwise captivating
  • good or loyal
  • continually absent
  • truly evil or indifferent
  • strong and stupid
  • nice, optimistic
  • girlishly freckled
  • quietly formidable
  • loving and most lovable
  • lean, genial
  • normal proportioned
  • abysmally foolish
  • virtuous or innocent
  • bankrupt or other
  • evil-minded and seditious
  • superstitious or highly imaginative
  • decent and confidential
  • self-sufficient, successful
  • silent, sallow
  • discreet, grave
  • thoroughly depraved and vicious
  • completely self-assured
  • exciting, fantastic
  • reasonable and open-minded
  • supposedly neutral and independent
  • chaste and delightful
  • totally spotless
  • swarthy, dried-up
  • sleekly prosperous
  • conscientious and mature
  • genuine crazy
  • intelligent but trusting
  • inept, unproductive
  • courteous gentle
  • crafty and unjust
  • eleventh wealthiest
  • smartest and most able
  • uncommonly strong and compact
  • odd ignorant
  • squalid and withered
  • generous and impartial
  • restless and absurd
  • intelligent or magical
  • picturesque colored
  • seemingly sane
  • surpassingly decent
  • interesting and companionable
  • regrettably exotic
  • alien, peculiar
  • english-speaking irish
  • terrible but most fascinating

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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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