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 personification
Below is a list of describing words for personification. 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 personification:
- immortal anthropomorphic
- bad emblematical
- human and rather violent
- mythological anthropomorphic
- grandly weird
- imaginative and grandly weird
- merely poetical or metaphorical
- austere and sacred
- impulsive and occasional
- inarticulate and uncouth
- altogether heroic
- ultimate stereotypical
- vague primitive
- poetic or ethical
- huge and bloated
- humorous national
- intensely anthropomorphic
- excessively jealous
- mere unthinking
- chaste, celestial
- necessary and spontaneous
- magnificent and majestic
- mysterious and dreadful
- essen\-tial
- lean, haggard
- spontaneous and innate
- same anthropomorphic
- marvellously vivid
- permanent and unchanging
- trimensional
- loveliest and purest
- dumb blind
- anthropomorphic
- later popular
- new satirical
- conscious artistic
- immediate and particular
- merely poetical
- actual and visible
- actual, physical
- shrewd and humorous
- somewhat vulgar
- cold, implacable
- ancient mythological
- semi-abstract
- same ideal
- real, tangible
- purely poetic
- inapt
- still bolder
- less harmless
- stern military
- emblematical
- more benign
- always beautiful
- rather violent
- normal and abnormal
- dapper little
- allegoric
- chimerical
- wonderful and beautiful
- perfect human
- alphabetic
- mythological
- more realistic
- old pagan
- allegorical
- dumpy
- metaphorical
- unthinking
- symbolical
- more complete
- same religious
- bolder
- literal
- unrivaled
- mythical
- frigid
- bovine
- poetical
- innocent little
- bombastic
- abstract
- crudest
- poetic
- immanent
- equestrian
- stereotypical
- ideal
- latter-day
- much-abused
- concurrent
- unworthy
- illusory
- prim
- spontaneous
- nebulous
- antagonistic
- analogous
- haggard
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.
