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 quantity
Below is a list of describing words for quantity. 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 quantity:
- dubious and unknown
- irrational unreal
- soulless, imaginary
- same syllabical
- however preferred
- additional and larger
- scary unknown
- absolutely limitless
- sufficient but temperate
- equally definite and constant
- necessary, measurable
- cheaper and greater
- immense redundant
- correspondingly extra
- red and equal
- highly unknown
- unknown, unpredictable
- imaginary or irrational
- considerable finite
- great and somewhat ostentatious
- shocking false
- measurable serial
- just intrinsic
- practically undiminished
- negligible and useless
- residual or unknown
- frightful false
- much, smaller
- deal, great
- certain and appreciable
- graduatingly smaller
- large and prohibitive
- variable and imponderable
- truly indefinite
- you--personal
- vulgar immediate
- countless and infinite
- negligible physical
- unholy vast
- unknown or unspecified
- anxious unknown
- minimum and insignificant
- gross and unmanageable
- perplexing unknown
- negligible journalistic
- euqal
- fourth unknown
- huge and unusual
- somewhat definite and measurable
- pure, undifferentiated
- negligible and disagreeable
- variable uncertain
- unfathomable, unmeasurable
- distinctly visible and appreciable
- larger volitional
- mere respective
- small but very rich
- metaphysical unknown
- indispensable unknown
- comfortingly negligible
- headstrong unknown
- absolutely negligible
- new indeterminate
- necessary, direct
- large or good
- small and very cheap
- woefully negative
- decidedly malignant
- permissibly negligible
- distressingly unknown
- unknown and perplexing
- undetermined linear
- extremely unknown
- ideal limited
- large and entirely worthless
- unknown and possibly ominous
- unlucky false
- absolute annual
- plain, calculable
- original positive
- equal aggregate
- undefined small
- static or stationary
- fine, same
- unmanageable human
- particularly negligible
- theoretically necessary
- proper variable
- variable but large
- requisite large
- relatively smaller or greater
- readily estimable
- syllabical
- uncertain, human
- much negligible
- absolutely immense and overwhelming
- dainty limited
- serious and even dangerous
- therefore negligible
- permanent and therefore negligible
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
