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 plumage
Below is a list of describing words for plumage. 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 plumage:
- bright but tasteless
- black, immature
- white nuptial
- fiery, multicolored
- oriental iridescent
- normal removable
- primarily black and yellow
- quite vivid and palpable
- extremely green
- rich and varicolored
- variegated and bright
- dense and somewhat fibrous
- remarkably striking and beautiful
- bright and softly blended
- fawn-colored and bluish
- sober upper
- lovely soft and fluffy
- lustrous, colored
- dainty snow-white
- primarily black
- otherwise black and white
- golden and azure
- ecstatic golden
- striking colored
- browny red
- beautiful and finely variegated
- uncommonly green
- perfectly black and glossy
- dainty but not brilliant
- still fresh and thick
- precious snow-white
- rich and changeable
- wonderfully shiny
- glossy and radiant
- conspicuous nuptial
- gay or perfect
- best nuptial
- sexual and immature
- strangely gaudy
- red or snow-white
- brighter and richer
- ethereal bright
- first-year or second-year
- nondescript juvenal
- largely black and white
- brilliant or very dull
- exceedingly beautiful and brilliant
- brilliant diversified
- variegated and magnificent
- distinctive, male
- characteristic gay
- also dissimilar
- variegated immature
- upper grey
- beautifully resplendent
- strange and tropical
- gorgeous and variegated
- resplendent nuptial
- full juvenal
- golden and variegated
- generally blue-green
- general purple
- bluish or brown
- white and dark-gray
- loose scanty
- exceedingly gaudy
- full nuptial
- excessively beautiful
- white conspicuous
- rose-pink and scarlet
- vivid and palpable
- long and glossy
- colorful but tasteless
- spectacular tonsorial
- gay and somber
- distinctive black-and-white
- hot sleek
- garish informal
- gay, disheveled
- sleek, unruffled
- gaudily variegated
- handsome but sober
- somewhat fibrous
- always brighter
- thy unruffled
- brilliant and variegated
- strange and most gorgeous
- lovely grey and white
- rare and bright
- whole incomparable
- soft puffy
- grey and rose-pink
- rusty brownish
- brown, black and white
- dull gray-blue
- richest and most variegated
- ordinary dowdy
- brilliant and outstanding
- always darker
- perfect black-and-white
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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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