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 poetry
Below is a list of describing words for poetry. 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 poetry:
- damned maritime
- rich and very physical
- chinese lyric
- religious lyric
- net recent
- quaint and native
- salacious erotic
- medieval turkish
- romantic narrative
- didactic or ethical
- middle-class didactic
- pathetic and impassioned
- doric lyric
- spanish lyric
- preferred lyric
- purple but cloudy
- sympathetic devotional
- harmonious and sublime
- perfect and very poisonous
- strict pastoral
- sensuous and somewhat morbid
- facetious and burlesque
- simple and sentimental
- unpublished gaelic
- french lyric
- naive and sentimental
- elfin classic
- sometimes elizabethan
- mute melodious
- classical and artificial
- progressive universal
- spurious and uneven
- lyric and pastoral
- impressive but unhealthy
- poetry--real
- respectable sacred
- iambic and lyric
- courtly lyric
- first-class heroic
- victorian lyrical
- reflective or lyric
- bad or common
- italian narrative
- magnificent republican
- regular and pretentious
- patriotic lyrical
- impressive and genuine
- sometimes remote and difficult
- fresh, primeval
- just laotian
- satirical and elegiac
- old banal
- ideal dramatic
- pastoral and local
- popular warlike
- equally grand and ornamental
- especially lyric
- own and dramatic
- vigorous or vital
- moderns--classical and romantic
- moderns--classical
- bold and awful
- bucolic and erotic
- genuine three-dimensional
- anonymous bad
- elegant and primal
- frequently delightful
- usually stilted and boring
- french narrative
- concrete fractal
- bad, obscure
- noble hebraic
- lyric, didactic
- intuitive, irrepressible
- much fugitive
- originally direct and personal
- originally direct
- genuinely nationalist
- mediaeval and popular
- didactic and panegyrical
- moral, didactic and panegyrical
- same orphic
- personal formal
- elegiac or amorous
- intensely personal and direct
- real elegiac
- chiefly subjective or lyrical
- chiefly subjective
- short, pastoral
- lyrical and subjective
- correct, eloquent
- pedantic vulgar
- ancient or national
- amatory and emotional
- beautiful anonymous
- rude unconscious
- formal lyric
- doric and choral
- later sicilian
- idyllic and didactic
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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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