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 question
Below is a list of describing words for question. 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 question:
- not-so-rhetorical
- obvious complementary
- valid philosophical
- thoroughly rhetorical
- ultimate internal
- penetratingly unspoken
- historical and financial
- serious and greater
- angry, impudent
- near-rhetorical
- now near-rhetorical
- particular rhetorical
- final, unspoken
- single embarrassing
- perennial troubling
- low and indistinguishable
- sticky political
- practical and very important
- cold offensive
- heretical missionary
- delicate, dim
- last and really great
- puzzling topographical
- irreverent and audacious
- fascinating but quite different
- somewhat theological
- metaphysical and somewhat theological
- last inane
- quiet, monotone
- ultimate, fatal
- dim, eternal
- incredibly normal
- occasional neutral
- dangerous, outstanding
- trite and frivolous
- great and unanswerable
- catechistical
- supremely inappropriate
- shocking judicial
- same one-word
- unpleasantly direct
- curious and most puzzling
- impossible theological
- damnably reasonable
- central school-district
- irrefutable and incontrovertible
- ultimate distributive
- terrible international
- far-reaching and complex
- big unanswered
- uncommonly personal
- awfully personal
- appropriately naive
- deeply existential
- greatest unanswered
- completely useless and dangerous
- far deeper and sharper
- deeper and sharper
- overpowering, practical
- basic and profoundly disturbing
- readily answerable
- unexpected and exceedingly simple
- frenzied and fantastic
- fearful, frenzied and fantastic
- often sticky
- trifling and subtle
- abrupt but decisive
- burdensome insistent
- embarrassing and impertinent
- dazzling and perceptive
- further impudent
- direct and relevant
- short, judicious
- certainly antique and genuine
- certainly antique
- new, insoluble
- perplexing and obscure
- closest trial
- delicate pecuniary
- interesting and far wider
- bitterly vital
- bulgarian or egyptian
- simply inexplicable or absurd
- simply inexplicable
- cautious introductory
- difficult and excruciating
- merely political or economic
- immediate and very practicable
- usual original
- unasked
- thorny moral
- purely rhetorical
- rhetorical or humorous
- classically foolish
- essentially unanswerable
- second touchy
- sudden point-blank
- basic, natural
- basic epistemological
- fatal, insoluble
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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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