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 reasons
Below is a list of describing words for reasons. 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 reasons:
- noble and most sovereign
- verifiable moral
- temporary, happier
- aesthetic, personal
- personal and prospective
- simpler and equally valid
- entirely different and compelling
- different but sufficient
- ethical or personal
- symbolic and fantastically aesthetic
- fantastically aesthetic
- apparent medical
- various sufficient
- perfectly good and sufficient
- expansive and exhaustive
- rather nervous and restless
- pure practical
- compelling fundamental
- obscure impenetrable
- plausible, intelligible
- proportionately grave
- quite plain and simple
- subtle and insane
- archaic obsolete
- unknown and absolutely inexplicable
- many compelling
- truly natural or religious
- idle and insulting
- harsh mathematical
- good mythological
- main and simple
- strange and seemingly improbable
- common and very simple
- plausible but ridiculous
- complex and irrelevant
- sexist or social
- several compelling
- compelling extra
- simply cultural
- completely unfathomable
- actually clearer
- whole, abundant
- artistic or patriotic
- subconscious mnemonic
- valid, moral
- improper and filthy
- wholly extra-terrestrial
- foremost and fundamental
- cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial
- single lawful
- different and compelling
- ultimate and sufficient
- sundry weighty
- sonic obscure
- personal and spherical
- quick fourth
- sensible, predictable
- strangely double
- conclusive but indirect
- excellent and very magnanimous
- weighty public
- worst, stupidest
- special and strong
- straight, past
- still other and stronger
- simple and very sufficient
- temporary and very special
- ethico-practical
- excellent and obvious
- fallacious human
- anew common and universal
- sudden, sufficient
- anew common
- decisive, secret
- other and sufficient
- good and weighty
- many valid
- perfect official
- same unspecified
- apply blithe
- devious internal
- valid academic
- immediate and logical
- good goddamned
- selfish and professional
- best and most ostensible
- purely selfish and professional
- good or satisfactory
- arbitrary or personal
- unrealized sanitary
- trivial specific
- unknown but imperative
- acute and conclusive
- strong economical
- poetic or aesthetic
- obviously sufficient
- specious and solid
- strongest architectural
- purely heterosexual
- trite, universal
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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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