Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 plan

Below is a list of describing words for plan. 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 plan:

  • exclusive and inflexible
  • consistent general
  • general mammalian
  • utterly unpalatable
  • coherent economic
  • far-reaching and ambitious
  • previously agreed-on
  • expeditious and decisive
  • brilliantly devious
  • subtle, superior
  • essentially benign and nonviolent
  • benign and nonviolent
  • dangerous alternate
  • easiest and most practicable
  • judicious and constitutional
  • feasible and rational
  • cleverly intricate
  • selfish, asinine
  • selfish and insane
  • top-confidential
  • logical and methodical
  • painfully logical and methodical
  • latest and boldest
  • second seven-year
  • preconceived and definite
  • transverse triapsal
  • non-competitive regional
  • hugely intricate
  • startlingly wonderful
  • tactically bankrupt
  • likeliest or safest
  • sudden, outrageous
  • big, useful
  • feeble, feeble
  • realistic or clearheaded
  • entire diabolical
  • big ineffable
  • ineffable divine
  • regularly preconceived
  • artless, unencumbered
  • singularly new and original
  • fair, workable
  • overall architectural
  • same homological
  • rather vague and sketchy
  • worked-out fiendish
  • reasonable, straightforward
  • weird, bold
  • coolly thought-out
  • boldly audacious
  • brief and hopefully quiet
  • divine, immutable
  • pleasant and notable
  • crazy, fruitless
  • superior, vague
  • cash-flow capital
  • ably clever
  • simplest, smartest
  • fairly feasible
  • shortest and brightest
  • comprehensive and unified
  • great but personal
  • bloody riotous
  • comprehensive and efficient
  • skilful but not unusual
  • five-meal
  • same strategical
  • convenient and acceptable
  • wonderful and almost inconceivable
  • extensive but ridiculous
  • economic regional
  • logical and inexorable
  • shorter and even better
  • full concerted
  • simple and really wise
  • foolish and aimless
  • well-defined and pre-arranged
  • big daring
  • suicidally stupid
  • latest five-year
  • coherent practical
  • conservative, fail-safe
  • complete and foolproof
  • insidious and covert
  • goddamned terrorist
  • deeply ingenious
  • insane, idiotic
  • brilliant and insidious
  • longrange survival
  • as-yet incomplete
  • daring and still unproved
  • far baffling
  • intricate but fantastic
  • obviously foolhardy
  • okonomical
  • conservative and unimaginative
  • olical
  • complex and audacious
  • coherent, logical
  • elegant and satisfying

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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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