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 quantities
Below is a list of describing words for quantities. 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 quantities:
- small uncommercial
- small, uncommercial
- drunk vast
- dubious and unknown
- dry large
- irrational unreal
- back incredible
- away unequal
- supply enormous
- soulless, imaginary
- comparably liberal
- same syllabical
- regularly double
- however preferred
- abstruse econometric
- additional and larger
- such aggregate
- scary unknown
- just amazing
- absolutely limitless
- retail smaller
- sufficient but temperate
- annually immense
- equally definite and constant
- great and infinitely small
- necessary, measurable
- properly over-large
- cheaper and greater
- large and payable
- immense redundant
- appropriate larger
- aggregate great
- small or immoderate
- meal, considerable
- correspondingly extra
- enormous and unparalleled
- together equal
- red and equal
- meanwhile vast
- highly unknown
- metal and unbelievable
- unknown, unpredictable
- drunk stupendous
- imaginary or irrational
- untrained, unknown
- considerable finite
- theoretically limitless
- great and somewhat ostentatious
- big miscellaneous
- shocking false
- positively magical
- measurable serial
- abstract small
- just intrinsic
- abundant, enormous
- practically undiminished
- abstracted psychical
- negligible and useless
- considerable and very sensible
- residual or unknown
- concrete and discrete
- frightful false
- _ingredients_--equal
- much, smaller
- nearby and great
- deal, great
- reciprocally dependent
- certain and appreciable
- trifling and variable
- graduatingly smaller
- down incalculable
- large and prohibitive
- timbered great
- variable and imponderable
- thick and great
- truly indefinite
- you--personal
- vulgar immediate
- dry, such
- countless and infinite
- supply considerable
- negligible physical
- small and variable
- unholy vast
- small but available
- unknown or unspecified
- drunk large
- anxious unknown
- drunk enormous
- minimum and insignificant
- back meaningful
- gross and unmanageable
- shellal large
- perplexing unknown
- apply larger or smaller
- negligible journalistic
- apply larger
- euqal
- relative and approximate
- fourth unknown
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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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