Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 raiment

Below is a list of describing words for raiment. 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 raiment:

  • white but insufficient
  • colorful festive
  • scanty and tattered
  • sumptuous and imperial
  • stiff, scanty
  • hardly decent
  • gorgeous and unsuitable
  • once gay and flimsy
  • scant and transparent
  • strange and shapeless
  • costly imperial
  • shameful or pernicious
  • much and beautiful
  • gilt and rosy
  • absurd and rusty
  • well-known festal
  • tattered and seedy
  • splendid festal
  • new festal
  • finest warm
  • neat, middle-class
  • rough, thy
  • glad white
  • pompous and sacred
  • old and deliberately unfashionable
  • scanty and thin
  • sorry and scanty
  • rusty, clerical
  • barbaric brocaded
  • sombre solemn
  • splendid and jewelled
  • shockingly scanty
  • shockingly scant
  • exquisite and gaudy
  • unbelievably exquisite and gaudy
  • unbelievably exquisite
  • serviceable and appropriate
  • national airy
  • newest and most immaculate
  • smooth and dainty
  • hastily rich
  • thin and wanton
  • royal antique
  • sad, earth-colored
  • glad and expensive
  • smart outer
  • perhaps thicker
  • glorious silken
  • vile and coarse
  • costly blue
  • unsatisfied, new
  • thin tropical
  • dazzling oriental
  • bright and festive
  • fine ceremonial
  • luxurious outer
  • sheer and frothy
  • sober and rusty
  • black and sordid
  • powerfully coloured
  • stiff gorgeous
  • fantastic but scanty
  • grotesquely picturesque
  • decent but scanty
  • deliberately unfashionable
  • desperately shabby
  • fantastic and ever-changing
  • coarse and tattered
  • neat but coarse
  • dusty, greasy
  • studiously correct
  • strange gaudy
  • costly purple
  • dingy and dilapidated
  • gay and flimsy
  • bright ecclesiastical
  • richest royal
  • mystical white
  • perfect mortal
  • cool and dainty
  • thin and loose
  • fantastically gorgeous
  • softest pink
  • sad colored
  • soft, diaphanous
  • convenient and handsome
  • shaggy new
  • amazingly wonderful
  • muddy, disheveled
  • finest fairy
  • noble mental
  • chilly white
  • magnificent pink
  • less disreputable
  • picturesque and splendid
  • costly royal
  • certain airy
  • much gorgeous
  • sumptuous and beautiful
  • decidedly shabby

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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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