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 pronunciation
Below is a list of describing words for pronunciation. 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 pronunciation:
- true and then usual
- fashionable or peculiar
- tame and civil
- common and rapid
- correct classical
- ready and substantially correct
- best and most historic
- colloquial japanese
- peculiarly thick and guttural
- guttural and rather rude
- missionary, chinese
- correct italian
- plain and perfect
- slightly mangled
- locally correct
- polite or vulgar
- scholastically correct and proper
- correct and sure
- surprisingly correct and sure
- surprisingly correct
- frequently original and unprecedented
- least unmusical
- open, animated
- solemn traditional
- original incorrect
- own finical
- rapid or careless
- accurate french
- old broader
- full celtic
- sharp and exact
- vicious foreign
- defective french
- purposely wretched
- exceedingly harsh and guttural
- old or continental
- [*gidgee--colloquial
- true and modern
- correct urban
- pure tibetan
- disagreeable and nasal
- agreeable and accurate
- corrupt and provincial
- customary and preferable
- always vague and uncertain
- short or obscure
- mere corrupt
- harsh and full
- decimal binary
- present irish
- habitually atrocious
- sarcastically emphatic
- correct dutch
- exaggeratedly formal
- original galactic
- occasional faulty
- positive rasping
- temporally long
- temporally long or short
- vocal and integral
- careless or too speedy
- popular and actual
- scholastically correct
- full correct
- frequently original
- common corrupt
- colloquial gaelic
- correct irish
- standard latvian
- correct and distinct
- careful and distinct
- rigorous and accurate
- chopped and incomplete
- graceful and ready
- technical or local
- correct spanish
- wrong or improper
- peculiarly deliberate and distinct
- colloqual dutch
- rough guttural
- refined french
- vulgar and incorrect
- provincial or foreign
- much faulty
- corrupt modern
- old correct
- natural chinese
- open italian
- sadly defective
- peculiar provincial
- peculiar or individual
- correct and original
- casual, sloppy
- proper czech
- fairly widespread
- loud, deliberate
- precise, cultured
- typically clear
- old, imperfect
- solemn and familiar
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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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