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 pity
Below is a list of describing words for pity. 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 pity:
- heathen such
- purest and profoundest
- inexpressible soft
- contemptuous indulgent
- warm and discreet
- acceptable feminine
- tenderly suggestive
- bemused and bitter
- fawning and offensive
- passive sentimental
- fresh and passionate
- again relentless
- evident and indulgent
- profound, intolerable
- pure contemptuous
- liveliest and sorest
- little but good-natured
- human abstract
- aside quick
- zeal and scant
- good-natured and contemptuous
- condescending and arrogant
- lunatic, deserving
- sacred inexpressible
- strong, unconquerable
- negligent, courteous
- simple magnanimous
- incomprehensible, deserving
- miserable, deserving
- piteous, deserving
- great, compassionate
- seriously feminine
- sheer, sad
- vast, transcendent
- damned, disgusting
- delicate and excruciating
- pitiable, pitiful
- respectful and remorseful
- thine soft
- sheer humiliating
- sometimes remorseful
- profound and sometimes remorseful
- vain and languorous
- profoundest and most chivalrous
- passionate and guilty
- vague timid
- now chivalrous
- god-like, awful
- good-humored masculine
- bitter, heartfelt
- unavailing and repugnant
- safely unavailing
- hopeless and sad
- vast, unavailing
- many feelings--natural
- more, open
- odious and unfathomable
- romantic or aesthetic
- dangerously akin
- useless and feeble
- innocent, useless and feeble
- silent or vocal
- delicate and persistent
- sad, clear-eyed
- contemptuous and thoroughly cold
- remote, disdainful
- profound intolerable
- superb up-to-date
- infinite planetary
- great, indignant
- cold systematical
- indeed grievous
- helpless, agonizing
- profound and honest
- impotent and disruptive
- sad superior
- sheer, wrenching
- deep but suspicious
- unadulterated, anonymous
- immense and inarticulate
- hard and rare
- impersonal mild
- genuine, heart-rending
- sorrowful, angelic
- intense, unavailing
- nay loving
- exciting contemptuous
- benign, comprehensive
- vague sad
- infinite, gentle
- forlorn, compelling
- white and overweening
- deep, active
- far-away and contemptuous
- curious, unwilling
- reverent, enthusiastic
- again sentimental
- tolerant but contemptuous
- dreary passionate
- spurious, wretched
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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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