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 purpose
Below is a list of describing words for purpose. 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 purpose:
- apparent reasonable
- ambitious or unworthy
- far-off doubtful
- sole and evident
- definite didactic
- wasteful, stupid
- bold and solemn
- material or essential
- temporary and sole
- open ingenious
- true unconquerable
- common unlawful
- purely scientific and philanthropic
- eternal and most free
- high, inexorable
- meanly ambitious or unworthy
- meanly ambitious
- stiff and strenuous
- stout moral
- substantial symbolic
- observable reasonable
- useless but legally acceptable
- other, benign
- true viable
- avowed and sincere
- general and ever-present
- high and ultimate
- definite and masterful
- skilled, single-minded
- prime but private
- natural, nominal
- dark and specific
- wondrous and inflexible
- good and desperate
- common or culinary
- intelligent, comprehensive
- special and sole
- penitential, loving
- other and quite distinct
- special strategic
- innocent and logical
- single, unbreakable
- hearty and plain
- real, undeclared
- primarily commercial and scientific
- serious and timeless
- single and material
- grim and agile
- cold premeditated
- cruel and unattainable
- imply weak
- slightest revolutionary
- definite utilitarian
- serious and explicit
- basic, animal
- all-pervading moral
- tangible, positive
- his-real
- trivial defensive
- raw, blind
- eccentric but innocent
- anyhow decent
- benign or anyhow decent
- larger, historic
- basic constructive
- cunning and malevolent
- old and very important
- current, unswerving
- earthly decent
- seemingly sole
- frankly benevolent
- visible fictional
- useful and merciful
- sane and useful
- full and insolent
- grim unalterable
- vague but sole
- original avowed
- collective synthetic
- main musical
- practical or even historical
- well-defined, selfish
- definite and especial
- healthy, definite
- specific charitable
- double sanitary
- essential and immediate
- inglorious, fatal
- obtrusively moral
- main serious
- serious didactic
- specific finite
- praiseworthy and valiant
- immediate and smaller
- evidently selective
- sleepless and indomitable
- stern inarticulate
- ungracious, ignoble
- ostensible mechanical
- ostensible, useful
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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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