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 popularity
Below is a list of describing words for popularity. 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 popularity:
- quick and considerable
- unheard-of european
- widest and most affectionate
- universally pervasive
- wider temporary
- present undeserved
- wide and instantaneous
- unfailing romantic
- inborn, practical
- wide middle-class
- worth and well-deserved
- exclusive and unenviable
- unusual and immediate
- easy and traitorous
- tremendous and instantaneous
- \-utterly unexpected
- little undeserved
- worth and most disproportionate
- seeming social
- transient and undeserved
- hard-earned short-lived
- greatest and most startling
- insane local
- canal --personal
- eu--local
- peculiar exceptional
- exuberant and slightly vulgar
- perhaps unsurpassed
- prodigious world-wide
- universal and enormous
- sudden and astonishingly wide
- vicious and ephemeral
- sudden but too short-lived
- festival, such
- previously unbounded
- extensive and continual
- longed-for and unexpected
- nowhere wide
- enormous or sudden
- popular, long
- mysterious and extravagant
- unsubstantial and wholly undeserved
- late and hard-earned
- brief and noisy
- great but short-lived
- wider transient
- sheer, easy
- greater and longer-lived
- vast and cheap
- accidental and intrinsic
- instantaneous and world-wide
- universal and undiminished
- immense contemporary
- confusing personal
- immense temporary
- wide ecclesiastical
- more short-lived
- unbounded personal
- immense and worldwide
- phenomenally profitable
- brief but phenomenally profitable
- instant insincere
- prodigious and extraordinary
- long and widespread
- sultry and unwholesome
- often illusive
- often illusive and unstable
- present jocular
- immediate and phenomenal
- loud but transient
- snug, genteel
- vulgar and transient
- instantly proverbial
- immediate and instantly proverbial
- immediate and well-deserved
- spontaneous national
- political but not social
- approval and personal
- immediate and unassailable
- immediate or general
- considerable genuine
- survival and constant
- thrice unlucky
- immense and instantaneous
- welcome and immediate
- universal and instantaneous
- immense and well-deserved
- otherwise immense
- immediate and very great
- immediate and very wide
- french traditional
- once overwhelming
- sudden and most unusual
- short-lived local
- considerable immediate
- later tremendous
- frivolous fashionable
- universal and unbroken
- general and well-deserved
- present unbounded
Popular Searches
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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