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 ranks
Below is a list of describing words for ranks. 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 ranks:
- previous superior
- real and official
- prematurely exalted
- comital
- mostly lower
- lowly official
- equestrian or plebeian
- obsequious junior
- consular or patrician
- motionless deep
- lofty official
- comparatively innocent and cheerful
- middling and superior
- equal or darker
- ragged but recognizable
- non-cathedral
- lower magical
- illustrious or honorable
- long, blended
- patrician or consular
- middling or inferior
- honorable and equestrian
- inferior and middling
- highest noncommissioned
- simpler, lower
- equal formal
- anti-directorial
- later pre-eminent
- permanent canonical
- fifth official
- high and undefined
- ancient but somewhat impoverished
- incontestably higher
- proper and subordinate
- lowest ecclesiastical
- lower official
- neat triple
- sufficiently senior
- rear soviet
- armigerial
- long and unarmed
- highest evident
- mostly precise
- evidently colossal
- ageless, immutable
- stronger and far more
- silent and dangerous
- neat corresponding
- soulless, uncaring
- >ciently high
- middling and higher
- best, second
- longitudinal or perpendicular
- single and attentive
- fewest vertical
- lofty and most exalted
- meanest social
- conspicuous or obscure
- more penumbral
- ordinary equestrian
- unquestioned episcopal
- true proverbial
- undefined specific
- primary and lowest
- open and solid
- rear defensive
- middling and inferior
- same substantive
- middling and lower
- former lowest
- lower and median
- part-time diplomatic
- massive, parallel
- engagingly irregular but solid
- grubby, anonymous
- engagingly irregular
- unseen minor
- hostile second
- glossy, diagonal
- pre-eminent social
- traditionally white
- precious, newfound
- recently swollen
- secondary, second
- broad, resplendent
- next pathetic
- helpful other
- previous sixth
- inferior useful
- much feral
- oncoming solid
- ducal or episcopal
- thick joyful
- official top
- loose rhythmic
- higher ceremonial
- gray or sturdy
- highest noble
- awkward, homespun
- highest adept
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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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