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 puns
Below is a list of describing words for puns. 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 puns:
- bawdy triple
- fourth outrageous
- cheap and degraded
- surprisingly naughty
- innocent military
- distressingly bad
- okay and straight
- ridiculous and desperate
- innumerable and detestable
- final lousy
- fearfully low and vulgar
- perfect or excellent
- gay pacific
- rear or other
- rather implicit
- unforgettable bad
- gay, pacific
- harrowingly bad
- grotesque practical
- villainous and abortive
- somewhat atrocious
- oppressive and multitudinous
- lamentably stale
- comic, sparkling
- ditton--pictorial
- ingenious but grotesque
- antiquated and brutal
- myriad and childish
- mild ecclesiastical
- often pointless
- obvious and bad
- terrible bilingual
- ignoble tiny
- unintended insensitive
- span>beautifully convoluted
- fairly tedious
- wry freudian
- intentionally blasphemous
- cruel inadvertent
- abominable multilevel
- worthless and absurd
- often ill-timed
- single odious
- lowest and most disgusting
- usual pictorial
- extremely obscene
- canes_--mediæval
- canes_--medi�val
- canes_--mediaeval
- tolerable italian
- enough sexual
- real cunning
- usual atrocious
- evident double
- other outrageous
- truly unspeakable
- clever and obscure
- beautifully convoluted
- few infamous
- old pedantic
- fearfully low
- miserable double
- obvious german
- truly rotten
- mere metaphorical
- ancient and quaint
- historical and theological
- decidedly vulgar
- once current
- otherwise miserable
- quite unintentional
- good impromptu
- _pictorial
- rather reprehensible
- mere ancient
- cross-jurisdictional
- little pictorial
- own apt
- poor rude
- especially pleasing
- obscure mathematical
- favorite bad
- occasional solemn
- own unintentional
- _classical
- wholesale or retail
- less audacious
- excessively bad
physical
- perfectly rotten
- rather ironic
- mere wretched
- more horrid
- excruciatingly bad
- inevitable bad
- quite clever
- absolutely terrible
- corniest
- little visual
- extremely happy
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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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