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 prose
Below is a list of describing words for prose. 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 prose:
- supple periodic
- exquisitely lyrical and expressive
- terse and convincing
- penetrating journalistic
- often significant
- abrupt, rhapsodical
- dull historic
- rather rhythmical
- impassioned rhythmical
- usually unadorned and straightforward
- usually unadorned
- beautiful, facile
- reasonably interesting
- prudent, watchful
- own gushy
- probable gray
- crisply witty
- lyrical and expressive
- exquisitely lyrical
- easy and sparkling
- up-to-date and popular
- whole, plain
- contemporary plain
- beautiful or sparkling
- new literal
- scarcely legitimate
- imaginative and didactic
- circumlocutional poetic
- later colloquial
- singularly imperishable
- lucid and observant
- now foremost
- miserable masculine
- archaic, sonorous
- admirably pithy
- exactly purple
- formal, meaningless
- slick, hard-hitting
- informal, comfortable
- original and lyrical
- lighter elizabethan
- mere lumbering
- attractive and good
- absolutely unredeemed
- spontaneous and straightforward
- lastly artistic
- ornamental and artistic
- emotional or ecstatic
- rhythmical poetical
- emotional rhythmical
- rhythmical emotional
- melodious and amusing
- common available
- lucid and exquisite
- german rhythmic
- strong, simple and nervous
- singularly robust and masculine
- brief inimitable
- plain and most loyal
- sensible and scientific
- abstruse technical
- careful multidimensional
- expressive and evocative
- playful, sardonic
- elegant, witty
- exhilaratingly efficient
- archaic jacobean
- dramatic but utterly realistic
- remarkably colorful and inventive
- tersely judgmental
- bloodless bureaucratic
- lucid, grammatical
- hysterical purple
- solid, serviceable
- lucid, passionate
- disturbing, evocative
- precise, clear
- awkward, redundant
- incisive and vigorous
- natural eloquent
- remarkably simple and direct
- stately rhythmical
- clear eloquent
- pathetic descriptive
- arid scientific
- fanciful, ornate and devotional
- clumsy parliamentary
- energetic and impressive
- strong, energetic and impressive
- worthiest religious
- proportioned lucid
- plain unpictorial
- virile and luminous
- eighteenth-century conversational
- hymnal, pre-classical
- often stormy and contentious
- turgid or fanciful
- mildly spirited
- locally interesting
- massive and sinewy
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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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