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 pictures
Below is a list of describing words for pictures. 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 pictures:
- consummate monochrome
- amusing and powerful
- beautiful four-color
- gloriously true
- specific blocky
- clearer overall
- gaudy symbolical
- back recognizable
- tranquil and dreamy
- graphic but truthful
- hitherto unreleased
- lovely three-dimensional
- slanderous and insane
- lifelike and realistic
- remorsefully faithful
- clear and remorsefully faithful
- exquisite and satisfying
- animated flat
- suggestive, historical
- graphic and indeed charming
- well-known and very important
- compact and magnificent
- somewhat repetitive
- startling and truthful
- gray uninteresting
- quaint, coloured
- tensely clear
- clear, three-dimensional
- foolish sorry
- fuzzy two-dimensional
- vaunted imaginary
- sharp and realistic
- seemingly sacred
- relatively sharp and realistic
- narrow and seemingly sacred
- original, fuzzy
- goddam spectacular
- weak and vague
- pacific and highly gratifying
- symmetrical and consistent
- glorious and sombre
- fairest and softest
- vivid mental
- exclusive behind-the-scenes
- total clinical
- grainy x-rated
- incongruously neat
- hermaphroditical italian
- coherent, comprehensive
- rectangular colored
- familiar anatomical
- singularly fresh and vivid
- greatest and most dramatic
- ghastly mental
- dim, composite
- curious and effeminate
- admirable and most characteristic
- important and very beautiful
- dutch or italian
- explanatory mental
- pre-arrival
- pale thin-lipped
- uncomfortable classical
- finer, larger
- dingy but important
- fair wonderful
- queerly disordered
- simpler dynamic
- vivid clairvoyant
- fascinating and frightening
- irresponsible romantic
- chinless and adenoidal
- small but very distinct
- static three-dimensional
- grand but indistinct
- edifying domestic
- botanically perfect
- faithful and satisfying
- truer historical
- curious and poignant
- true and panoramic
- particularly life-like
- gloomy but wonderfully strange
- delightful and perfectly harmonious
- peaceful, charming
- marvelously true
- world-wide strategic
- coherent and convincing
- tenderly humorous
- sudden nightmarish
- dismal mental
- simplified, stylized
- formerly unfathomable
- mar-velously clear
- bucolic and unexciting
- beautiful, tiled
- sudden and imaginary
- stiffly pious
- horrible satiric
- significant but often separate
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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