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 portrait
Below is a list of describing words for portrait. 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 portrait:
- strong two-tone
- ambitious unfinished
- vast simple
- formal monochrome
- utterly convincing and human
- convincing and human
- faithful and horrible
- emotional and sparkling
- critical and personal
- thrice flattering
- severely unflattering
- rough but entirely recognizable
- fractional, impressionistic
- sober and yet genial
- stunning and gruesome
- good candid
- big full-length
- hilarious and harrowing
- foreign fancy
- full-length, life-size
- fine authentic
- simply contemplative
- clear-eyed but sympathetic
- secret characteristic
- definitive human
- sional floor-to-ceiling
- bleak and unflattering
- wonderfully baroque
- tri-dimensional animated
- faulty and amateurish
- fierce and forbidding-looking
- highly interesting and excellent
- first-rate but flattering
- charmingly spirited
- magnificent but somewhat appalling
- exquisite and life-like
- genuine and very characteristic
- dreary but true
- brilliant, realistic
- brief but extremely sympathetic
- ideal heathen
- graphic full-length
- quite admirable and interesting
- full-size and full-length
- splendidly realistic
- good and massive
- flattering typical
- humorous and striking
- rich psychological
- full-length life-size
- entirely recognizable
- fine full-length
- small full-length
- classic unfinished
- discreetly blank
- willfully depressing
- almost trite
- unfinished double
- huge somber
- admittedly abstract
- halfway flattering
- lifelike full-size
- fan-tional
- large, pastel
- life-like or convincing
- incredibly atmospheric
- remarkably vivid and suggestive
- correct composite
- scriptural and popular
- carefully stippled
- complete pen-and-ink
- terrifyingly truthful
- ideal or allegorical
- tiresome and lifeless
- rather tiresome and lifeless
- striking or successful
- tolerably rich and vivid
- masterly unfinished
- grim contemporary
- fine life-size
- misleading and inadequate
- perhaps fine and delicate
- venerable, pale
- physiological and pictorial
- fascinating unsigned
- best full-length
- pitiable ashen
- remarkably villainous
- lifelike and extraordinarily attractive
- religiously harmonious
- life-size, full-length
- bitter but truthful
- fine pastel
- impressive and authentic
- desirable and genuine
- poetical female
- famous pastel
- odious and almost incredible
- subtle and striking
- excellent life-size
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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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