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 phenomena
Below is a list of describing words for phenomena. 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 phenomena:
- rjomical
- unknown atmospheric
- rare and lovely natural
- secondary or merely virtual
- uncommon and recondite
- portentous and unprecedented
- luminous meteoric
- partly mental
- invisible astronomical
- incidental, temporary
- --meteorological
- causal meteorological
- wonderful glacial
- singular and abnormal
- celestial and meteorological
- contemporaneous vital
- striking celestial
- tertiary emergent
- thereafter supernatural
- inexplicable cosmic
- direct meteorological
- merely electrical
- identifiable astronomical
- actual malevolent
- certain unobserved
- unfamiliar and unaccountable
- unclassified electrical
- amazing and potent
- vast, commercial
- mysterious, natural
- apparently capricious and unaccountable
- gravest natural
- natural colloidal
- strictly magical
- many paranatural
- dispassionate natural
- mere meteoritic
- unique theoretical
- normal volcanic
- odd but common
- repulsive or dangerous
- predictable stellar
- undesirable natural
- remarkable marital
- residual and doubtful
- fatal and unreasonable
- principal and most visible
- intrusive and portentous
- pointless and preposterous
- unsuspected natural
- fundamental, random
- ultimately material or spiritual
- magical and psychic
- queer and rather inexplicable
- strange high-speed
- rare or erratic
- own disruptive
- universal mammalian
- unsuspected high-energy
- natural unpredictable
- celestial and atmospheric
- heretofore unfamiliar
- legitimate psychic
- well-known astronomical
- obvious and every-day
- temporary, fleeting
- cataclysmic meteorological
- darkest physical
- nonphysical, nonbiological
- wonderful ministerial
- familiar but puzzling
- superb or beautiful
- religious and natural
- above-mentioned atmospheric
- moral, religious and natural
- mysterious subjective
- contemporaneous social
- tantalizingly deceptive
- electric and meteoric
- dreadful morbid
- electrical or vital
- insufferably irritating
- beautiful psychical
- supernormal vital
- extraordinary symptomatic
- faithfully certain
- various and highly interesting
- true residual
- equally disconcerting
- fairly local
- miscellaneous demonic
- para-causal meteorological
- unknown large-scale
- interesting cultural
- perfectly genuine and inexplicable
- paranormal or supernatural
- extremely disastrous
- trivial but strange
- sundry alien
- terrestrial biological
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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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