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 phenomenons
Below is a list of describing words for phenomenons. 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 phenomenons:
- unknown atmospheric
- rare and lovely natural
- secondary or merely virtual
- portentous and unprecedented
- luminous meteoric
- invisible astronomical
- incidental, temporary
- causal meteorological
- singular and abnormal
- tertiary emergent
- inexplicable cosmic
- identifiable astronomical
- actual malevolent
- unfamiliar and unaccountable
- amazing and potent
- mysterious, natural
- strictly magical
- dispassionate natural
- unique theoretical
- odd but common
- predictable stellar
- remarkable marital
- fatal and unreasonable
- intrusive and portentous
- pointless and preposterous
- unsuspected natural
- ultimately material or spiritual
- queer and rather inexplicable
- rare or erratic
- universal mammalian
- natural unpredictable
- heretofore unfamiliar
- well-known astronomical
- temporary, fleeting
- darkest physical
- wonderful ministerial
- superb or beautiful
- above-mentioned atmospheric
- mysterious subjective
- tantalizingly deceptive
- dreadful morbid
- insufferably irritating
- equally disconcerting
- fairly local
- para-causal meteorological
- interesting cultural
- paranormal or supernatural
- trivial but strange
- terrestrial biological
- irrelevant concurrent
- same climatological
- new nor unusual
- natrual
- weird fiery
- inexplicable astronomical
- clearly biological
- dangerous and essentially unpredictable
- unobserved medical
- short-lived natural
- contingent and individual
- highly derivative
- natural and generally prevalent
- extremely brutish
- non-natural and inexplicable
- continuous, unchanging
- imperious, inaccessible
- stupendous but natural
- curious autonomous
- singular meteorological
- naked metaphysical
- late post-classical
- widespread and remarkable
- inborn morbid
- innate morbid
- singular and scarcely credible
- meteorologico-zoological
- insignificant natural
- irreducible, primitive
- merely spatial
- already nobler
- twofold luminous
- curious and perhaps unique
- strange and very rare
- rather puzzling and interesting
- pregnant economic
- apparently simple and self-evident
- important and very general
- inconvenient sexual
- individual and temporal
- striking annual
- significant contradictory
- possibly transient
- insignificant and possibly transient
- odd and important
- unique austrian
- particularly surprising
- biologically significant
- mysterious and puzzling
- incredible thermal
- fascinating sociological
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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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