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 possessions
Below is a list of describing words for possessions. 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 possessions:
- actual illicit
- purportedly guilty
- precious and perpetual
- complete and furious
- original and unalterable
- choicest personal
- exclusive and peaceable
- contingent and rather showy
- sole worthwhile
- iron-clad, everlasting
- |illegal
- immemorial peaceable
- proudest and most valuable
- brief and distasteful
- separate or exclusive
- past and partial
- common or equal
- last and only italian
- loose and troubled
- inherent, original
- equally scanty and limited
- richer material
- outlying european
- real and corporal
- immense alaskan
- so-called demoniacal
- ample, independent
- complete and undisputed
- strictly popular and national
- full and peaceable
- eternal prosperous
- unreasonable and irregular
- precise, lawful
- full and functional
- desirable military
- peaceable and uncontested
- outlying territorial
- permanent and hostile
- mysterious demoniacal
- continuous demoniacal
- gratuitous undisturbed
- precious public
- temporary exclusive
- full and undisputed
- myriad distinctive
- full and tranquil
- unencumbered territorial
- blinding and complete
- unglamorous but highly individual
- calm and unheralded
- temporarily egyptian
- sole and undisturbed
- few but priceless
- public and uninterrupted
- quite useful and desirable
- disproportionate and unequal
- adventitious or transitory
- proud, intimate
- fair temporal
- mind-numbing, total
- vast unrealized
- immensely important and valuable
- sane and permanent
- imply separate
- oldest outlying
- peaceable and uninterrupted
- sole and tranquil
- fundamentally symbolic
- entire and lawful
- modern demoniacal
- strictly legal and exclusive
- dependent and secondary
- noisy and undisputed
- precious virginal
- quiet and unenvied
- solitary and victorious
- valuable and most characteristic
- full and pacific
- peaceable and undisputed
- actual and lawful
- speedy and sole
- exclusive and solitary
- twofold and also congenital
- undisturbed and immediate
- innermost and most substantial
- therefore joint
- now wrongful
- undisturbed continuous
- full and inalienable
- bare temporary
- intelligent and peaceful
- unforgettable mental
- good and habitual
- sole material
- extensive colonial
- quiet and sure
- contiguous british
- extensive territorial
- bleak but fabulously rich
- royal and rewarding
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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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