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 realism
Below is a list of describing words for realism. 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 realism:
- extreme, unrelieved
- strange negative
- depressing materialistic
- insane and rigid
- cold, incontrovertible
- spiritual, divine
- terrible, vigorous
- rather stark and tragic
- stark and tragic
- scrupulous spiritual
- broader epistemological
- traditional modern
- unenthusiastic but substantial
- perhaps historical
- pious and bourgeois
- quiet unerring
- natural and childish
- honest erotic
- hypothetical and unintelligible
- much-heralded but rather superficial
- incredibly bull-like
- scientific and pseudo-scientific
- fundamentally mechanistic
- confident, self-supporting
- quite misguided
- fierce, awkward
- unobtrusive and unconscious
- perfectly unobtrusive and unconscious
- frank, unblushing
- massive and laborious
- unrestrained passionate
- pessimistic and depressing
- somewhat pessimistic and depressing
- uncouth and unmusical
- enthusiastic subjective
- grossly superficial
- immediate and grossly superficial
- grim and vivid
- satirical or grotesque
- insignificant or offensive
- uncompromising platonic
- brilliant and precise
- sardonic and purposely prosaic
- healthful but unflattering
- severe, wide-awake
- commonplace and bald
- vivid, astonishing
- dull and mediocre
- offensive and coarse
- stark and dour
- unconsciously scrupulous
- sombre and dramatic
- distinctive, forceful
- tiresomely commonplace
- powerful but crass
- tight, cheap
- uncompromising decorative
- humorously solemn
- former gross
- rather coarse and brutal
- intense and naive
- quite unflinching
- exceedingly thoroughgoing
- accurate and merciless
- seemingly truthful
- satirical and not fastidious
- relentless anatomical
- propositional or analytic
- contemporary analytic
- absolute, intense
- accurate and even brutal
- bald external
- worth unrelieved
- joyous modern
- odd journalistic
- much prosaic
- simpler and bolder
- concrete and intelligible
- powerful artistic
- highly irrelevant
- finely compassionate
- bright european
- healthier sexual
- dirty martial
- edgy social
- meticulous psychological
- meticulous, heroic
- meticulous, sinuous
- traditional novelistic
- esthetic and even psychological
- illusory, grimy
- gothic magical
- literary pedestrian
- subcreational
- sober and unadorned
- so-called unflinching
- detestable feminine
- richly elegant
- nervous and luminous
- purposely prosaic
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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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