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 plight
Below is a list of describing words for plight. 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 plight:
- godly monkish
- late decayed
- perilous thy
- present piteous
- comfortable or happy
- far sorrier
- new, wretched
- rough inclement
- sad and filthy
- unhappy and contemptible
- truly unhappy and contemptible
- subsequent ridiculous
- strange, unprecedented
- pitiful bad
- present pitiful
- pitiable or ridiculous
- hapless, happy
- curious and even dreadful
- pitiable economic
- incredibly pathetic
- pitiable and dismal
- sore unworthy
- present post-war
- degrading, ludicrous
- piteous and hapless
- desperately abject
- obviously piteous
- now pitiable
- ironical, pitiful
- tattered, wet
- weary wretched
- truly sad and piteous
- present sorry
- common indifferent
- piteous thy
- historically miserable
- regrettable fiscal
- miserable sorry
- tattered, miserable
- dire spiritual
- miserable and joyless
- worse internal
- sad inglorious
- exceedingly evil
- awkward and distressing
- wet and forlorn
- miserable and most precarious
- altogether unpromising
- apparently hapless
- foulest and sorriest
- wretched and shameful
- absurd, old-fashioned
- such perplexed
- miserable and disgraceful
- unhappy, inglorious
- prosperous and affluent
- such rueful
- numb, helpless
- worse mental
- somewhat sorry
- scarce better
- present obscure
- sad and sinful
- wretched internal
- already perilous
- cold uncomfortable
- own humiliating
- truly pitiable
- such sorry
- present desperate
- sorry economic
- solemn sacred
- less gilded
- critical financial
- increasingly tragic
- ragged and miserable
- dire and awful
- white and haggard
- sad doleful
- same pitiable
- truly perilous
- recent distressing
- sad and rueful
- equally sore
- sad weary
- present sad
- extremely wretched
- more pitiable
- truly dismal
- present dreadful
- wet, disordered
- own embarrassing
- present unenviable
- less forlorn
- worse financial
- present pitiable
- sad and piteous
- present evil
- truly unhappy
- general evil
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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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