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 police

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

  • national aeronautical
  • haitian national
  • panamanian national
  • soviet secret
  • orange uniformed
  • judicial technical
  • detestable and tyrannical
  • largely authoritarian
  • faultless and delicious
  • plain secret
  • peruvian investigative
  • local and incompetent
  • blue, darker
  • desperately embattled
  • international criminal
  • australian federal
  • planetary and municipal
  • royal malaysian
  • well-turned-out single
  • french judicial
  • swank young
  • spanish federal
  • competent rural
  • maritime and sanitary
  • vigilant and well-regulated
  • hallucinatory, nonexistent
  • unofficial secret
  • unsmiling military
  • infamous secret
  • iranian secret
  • grubby routine
  • polish secret
  • crested special
  • tall special
  • sleepy, inefficient
  • infamous federal
  • pitifully inefficient
  • nosy and pitifully inefficient
  • evidently unwilling or unable
  • turkish secret
  • indeed japanese
  • _international criminal
  • nimble barefooted
  • general and internal
  • big and very pompous
  • hungarian medicinal
  • smart, quiet
  • frenchly uniformed
  • odd rare
  • national secret
  • strict secular
  • defensive and supplementary
  • cuban secret
  • strong and vigilant
  • damned secret
  • own worldwide
  • other midlevel
  • electronic secret
  • likely civilian
  • uniformed capital
  • mexican internal
  • fede~al
  • black secret
  • notorious metropolitan
  • best nocturnal
  • long-time undercover
  • korean na\-tional
  • danish governmental
  • swedish technical
  • bumbling local
  • exterior secret
  • worse, possible
  • overstaffed secret
  • stubbornly down-to-earth
  • painstaking secret
  • dumbfounded finnish
  • secret and political
  • all-powerful secret
  • fanatical secret
  • almost social
  • exceptionally abominable
  • vigilant and exact
  • highly proper and respectable
  • officious and unsympathetic
  • native municipal
  • using--special
  • miserable inefficient
  • efficient critical
  • vigorous and vigilant
  • incoherent and vexatious
  • [_rural
  • capable and not unwilling
  • military and regimental
  • spanish secret
  • royal omani
  • now silent and meditative
  • everlasting unknown
  • powerful and vigilant
  • supposedly vigilant
  • tardy but decisive

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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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