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 portraits
Below is a list of describing words for portraits. 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 portraits:
- strong two-tone
- ambitious unfinished
- vast simple
- formal monochrome
- utterly convincing and human
- convincing and human
- faithful and horrible
- emotional and sparkling
- dazed and sullen
- critical and personal
- endless familiar
- bloody piratical
- thrice flattering
- severely unflattering
- rough but entirely recognizable
- fractional, impressionistic
- sober and yet genial
- usual outsized
- stunning and gruesome
- faithful and harrowing
- good candid
- evidently individual
- big full-length
- several characteristical
- hilarious and harrowing
- manifestly faithful
- foreign fancy
- definite and intentional
- full-length, life-size
- three-quarter and full-length
- fine authentic
- careful sepulchral
- simply contemplative
- clear-eyed but sympathetic
- secret characteristic
- admirable irish
- terribly intimate
- definitive human
- different full-size
- sional floor-to-ceiling
- curious imaginary
- bleak and unflattering
- huge proud
- wonderfully baroque
- poses�formal
- tri-dimensional animated
- later poses�formal
- faulty and amateurish
- full-length historic
- fierce and forbidding-looking
- many apathetic
- highly interesting and excellent
- faithful or grotesque
- first-rate but flattering
- clearly life-like
- charmingly spirited
- full-length theatrical
- magnificent but somewhat appalling
- invariably typical
- 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
- several grimy
- little full-length
- rich psychological
- blue phosphorous
- full-length life-size
- doubtless faithful
- entirely recognizable
- fine full-length
- small full-length
- aesthetically sleazy
- classic unfinished
- pictures--probably miniature
- discreetly blank
- powerful presidential
- willfully depressing
- lovingly satirical
- almost trite
- irreverently faithful
- unfinished double
- vigorous, life-like
- huge somber
- grave or animated
- admittedly abstract
- vast equestrian
- halfway flattering
- sick exquisite
- lifelike full-size
- severely stylistic
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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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