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 progress
Below is a list of describing words for progress. 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 progress:
- deceptively rapid
- true and rapid
- generally messy
- steady and undeniable
- automatic and impersonal
- back economic and social
- normal languid
- unchecked technical
- steady material
- general, satisfactory
- short-run economic
- forward mutual
- gradual and ruinous
- nevertheless slow and difficult
- nevertheless slow
- uneven and jerky
- extraordinary and hasty
- steady temporal
- further mechanical and scientific
- disappointingly slow
- devout or triumphant
- slow, impossible
- insidious and profound
- greater developmental
- more and steadier
- easy and victorious
- regular harmonious
- fortunate and highly successful
- invisible but rapid
substantial
- queer terrestrial
- slow and apologetic
- aside vertical
- so-called vertical
- discouragmgly slow
- better racial
- late triumphal
- scarcely free
- scarcely free or exhilarating
- passionate material
- considerable and most promising
- abrupt or visible
- material nor moral
- subsequent peaceful
- gradual and great
- veritable triumphal
- impending industrial
- responsibility--psychological
- collective responsibility--psychological
- total overall
- rapid, economical and certain
- extremely difficult and uncomfortable
- hasty and heedless
- recent visible
- further lateral
- steady and satisfactory
- rapid and masterful
- childish and stormy
- back economic
- canted, awkward
- aboveground notable
- continual and indefinite
- slower over-all
- fantastically rapid
- independent technological
- vaunted scientific
- orderly normal
- necessarily slow and laborious
- later triumphant
- prodigious scientific
- rapid and even wonderful
- brief, true
- extremely heartening
- extraordinary and praiseworthy
- voluntary, sure
- painfully slow and toilsome
- long and purposely slow
- uninterrupted, peaceful
- dynamic, revolutionary
- gradual but gigantic
- necessarily slow and arduous
- forward spiritual
- wearisome, dismal
- real and safe
- material and economical
- cycles--early astronomical
- equal and mechanical
- material, moral and mental
- weak, cautious
- astonishing and real
- true and most beneficial
- westward considerable
- substantial and unusual
- steady and unrestrained
- allowable and natural
- steady and virile
- sure, solemn
- steady, continuous and hopeless
- incessant and sublime
- falsely infinite
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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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