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 recognition
Below is a list of describing words for recognition. 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 recognition:
- reverent and fitting
- gradual and practical
- explicit and unlimited
- clear and unqualified
- formal and cordial
- enlightened and larger
- ultimate and world-wide
- formal, habitual
- tardy but complete
- ready humorous
- fake personal
- harsh sensory
- humorously frank
- generous and instantaneous
- welcome and broad
- full and indefinite
- general and complimentary
- conscious, naive
- speedier popular
- swift and almost whimsical
- bitter but inevitable
- roadside--mutual
- ancient, inescapable
- deserving considerable
- breathless glad
- explicit, conscious
- last crippling
- spontaneous and overwhelming
- sharp and instantaneous
- tacit or occasional
- other, frank and full
- openly divine
- prominent or official
- joyous, reverent
- momentary terrible
- clear and successful
- fuller conscious
- embarrassing ambiguous
- similar mutual
- old and almost past
- unanimous and complete
- altogether intelligent
- humble and natural
- mere certain
- scanty and grudging
- universal anti-christian
- special gracious
- bitter, woeful
- rigid past
- decayed past
- deep secretive
- public and artistic
- brutal, uncluttered
- full, spontaneous
- warm contemporary
- public and cordial
- scant official
- unaided and impartial
- honest and philosophical
- perceptive and logical
- due popular
- accurate and legal
- permanent or lucrative
- prettiest minor
- joyous sentimental
- more and circumspect
- formal definite
- corjial
- arty nor corjial
- long-delayed social
- unaccustomed and sometimes acute
- gracious and girlish
- wide and too public
- falsely chivalrous
- cordial and thorough
- general and judicial
- clear and special
- constant and humbling
- almost immediate and universal
- clear and wholehearted
- unmistakable and brilliant
- formal and periodical
- tacit national
- obscure, haunting
- particularly stingy
- explicit judicial
- honorable and universal
- orestes--general
- widespread and cordial
- belated but unconscious
- deep or very effective
- instinctive and occasional
- gallingly gracious
- joyous and insistent
- tardy and unenthusiastic
- best grudging
- sodden past
- immediate and courteous
- due distinctive
- capital official
Popular Searches
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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