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 philosophers
Below is a list of describing words for philosophers. 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 philosophers:
- zeal modern
- illustrious natural
- dear teutonic
- lawless modern
- free official
- remarkably decorous
- misanthropical, sceptical
- formidable liberal
- delphically visionary
- acute and metaphysical
- ingenious and observant
- idiot buddhist
- french experimental
- penetrating and able
- pagan political
- indulgent moral
- poring and gloomy
- sublime and most subtle
- esoteric disembodied
- nineteenth-century danish
- ancient, reclusive
- thoughtful theistic
- theistical natural
- italian natural
- ionic natural
- once cosmopolitan
- alchemystical
- sternly tentative
- speculative and analytical
- principal and most judicious
- senile self-styled
- german natural
- frail and solemn
- insurgent female
- twentieth-century jewish
- godless literal-minded
- famous scholastic
- soft-spoken, stoical
- famous pessimistic
- greatest scholastic
- dear barefooted
- precritical or dogmatic
- old moribund
- prickly grim
- unbelieving or heretical
- doughty modern
- strict and worthy
- now cartesian
- youthful and modest
- definitely revolutionary
- enraged comic
- entirely original and profound
- french evolutionary
- choicest and most profound
- conventional, amiable
- pre-eminently physical
- mystic and natural
- several hermetical
- pedantically systematic
- earlier profound
- able platonic
- erudite historical
- sober, prudent and wise
- fashionable natural
- greatest experimental
- true epicurean
- mock mathematical
- finest utilitarian
- old-time medieval
- disembodied female
- professional speculative
- swiss-born french
- medieval natural
- diligent natural
- rationalistic and atheistic
- foremost natural
- darker german
- bold and rationalistic
- few professorial
- stern and yet indulgent
- inarticulate natural
- ill moral
- constructively skillful
- ingenious and virtuous
- cartesian and other
- oppressed heathen
- shallow or cold
- inconsistent and unreal
- buoyant, genuine
- conscientious, platonic
- wonderful seventeenth-century
- astronomical, critical
- foremost physical
- wild and profound
- humane political
- serene and optimistic
- earlier grecian
- impartial and yet indulgent
- favorite and other
- salaried domestic
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.
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