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 reference
Below is a list of describing words for reference. 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 reference:
- fundamental and factual
- viable visual
- altogether unserious
- obvious and unsubtle
- own two-digit
- evil satanic
- halfway naughty
- perfect navigational
- authoritative factual
- formal and ancestral
- distinct identifiable
- peculiar and uncivil
- special but not exclusive
- unpremeditated, unusual
- further pronominal
- arcane literary
- constant and explicit
- directly individual
- special and directly individual
- barest historical
- =--special
- systematic, intensive
- figurative or symbolical
- profane--probably satirical
- almost parenthetical
- slight and almost parenthetical
- ungenerously contemptuous
- earliest ritual
- latent polemic
- brief but helpful
- lighthearted or innocuous
- obliquely derogatory
- more pronominal
- significantly distant
- allegorical or political
- often implicit
- sorry, classical
- strict and beautiful
- probably satirical
- due shakespearian
- plain typical
- short enigmatical
- intentional literal
- excessively disgusting
- slight and perfunctory
- slightest or remotest
- martial, editorial
- vilely idiotic
- derivative and conditional
- apparent polemic
- scanty and misleading
- real predominant
- immediate controversial
- faint informal
- respectful and even affectionate
- thoughtful but familiar
- possible distinct
- *directional
- undefined external
- slightly irreverent
- small but very comprehensive
- potentially eschatological
- deliberately oblique
- unfortunately pungent
- calm, audacious
- direct marginal
- definitely theological
- governmental ready
- individualistic personal
- recondite and malignant
- harsh and ungallant
- such and personal
- contemptuous and ribald
- teleogical
- conscious or direct
- earliest complimentary
- implicit and hostile
- incorrect geographical
- intimate and especial
- such, exclusive
- mere prefatorial
- double local
- botanical ready
- oblique and cautious
- least panegyrical
- brand-new contemporary
- favorite natural
- courteous commonplace
- recurrent and insistent
- copious and scrupulous
- incidental biblical
- persional
- continual autobiographical
- distinct and often simple
- mystical and messianic
- least, direct
- special, typical
- distinctive and unquestionable
- enigmatical but satisfactory
- earliest statutory
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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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