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 preferences
Below is a list of describing words for preferences. 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 preferences:
- unenlightened popular
- architectural and domestic
- habitual or even occasional
- secret and really sincere
- painfully sober
- arbitrary cultural
- instinctive and selective
- unfair or unnecessary
- violent individual
- stiff and unchangeable
- unaccountable and exclusive
- supposedly deviant
- simple dietary
- less-than-traditional sexual
- hopeful but misleading
- secret sentimental
- surprising and disgusting
- inborn instinctive
- personal sexual
- less-than-conventional sexual
- inherent and traditional
- together—“personal
- almost obsessional
- slight, innate
- current sexual
- especially ultimate
- generally unreasonable
- sentimental, moral or intellectual
- readily definite
- individual temperamental
- direct and ruinous
- different bookish
- slack and slipshod
- individual intimate
- violent and exclusive
- successive personal
- present--individual
- earlier incompatible
- implied--individual
- ardent individual
- proverbial academic
- avowed or evident
- |personal
- obstinate constitutional
- exceedingly sincere
- amiss thy
- instinctive, natural
- astonishing and perplexing
- deep-seated aesthetic
- statutory unconditional
- well-known seasonal
- seventeenth-century monarchical
- particular and unkind
- unnecessary partisan
- peculiar and unliterary
- curious, indefensible
- inalienable and masterful
- paramount and perpetual
- singular and scandalous
- conscious, sovereign and everlasting
- mere fastidious
- deliberate, scientific
- available next
- admirable and deserving
- imaginative sexual
- young, special
- perhaps intelligent
- rational and deliberate
- blind and accidental
- distinct atmospheric
- charming, unreasonable
- economic or aesthetic
- indeterminate sexual
- trivial aesthetic
- vain, personal
- irrational and bigoted
- frequent, sexual
- unexamined and dogmatic
- dominant sexual
- utterly individual
- personal academic
- real, intense
- further available
- energetic individual
- special varietal
- obstinate, constitutional
- effective colonial
- possible or apparent
- distinctly aesthetic and artistic
- bright, perverse
- justifiable natural
- cumulative and non-cumulative
- mild, bovine
- private and inexplicable
- sovereign and everlasting
- undue and unreasonable
- ethnic, sexual
- unnatural and unpatriotic
- sentimental and highly flattering
- typical presidential
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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