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 reflections
Below is a list of describing words for reflections. 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 reflections:
- unfailing tragic
- vain sedate
- longest and most agonizing
- blinding brilliant
- ugly significant
- own dumbfounded
- unavailing and painful
- mindless, youthful
- gloomy, russet
- ruddy mournful
- partial and wishy-washy
- fancy or profound
- merely partial and wishy-washy
- lively fancy or profound
- sad and irritating
- incongruous and absurd
- back splendid
- dark pastel
- back dazzling
- common academic
- father-in-law--moral
- still titanic
- original and deep
- undeveloped and yet unmistakable
- visionary cosmographical
- undeniably satisfying
- free and severe
- duly cautious
- suggestive philosophic
- deep or absurd
- short but sufficiently painful
- mournful and ironical
- happily equivocal
- faithful and necessary
- due and selfish
- faint and fantastic
- most disquieting
- myriad deceptive
- nervous, orange
- wise, philosophical
- horrid, pale
- main faithful
- far luminous
- sombre, murky
- haltingly conscious
- flattest and poorest
- cruelly faithful
- deeply pious and moral
- mature and anxious
- aforesaid philosophical
- still clear and brilliant
- pale and incorrect
- considerate and comprehensive
- commonplace and wearisome
- same derogatory
- back unequal
- original and relevant
- secondary and consequent
- greenish or mother-of-pearl
- excellent pious
- rational and even religious
- various statesmanlike
- brilliant, complete
- bitterest and most sarcastic
- tremulous metallic
- actually atheistic
- late and highly sophisticated
- metallic and iridescent
- amiable and deep
- sorry threadbare
- anxious and harrowing
- frequent bitter
- sarcastic, national
- honest alphabetical
- sole and indivisible
- bluish and purple
- accordingly intermediate
- gloomy but useless
- constant and unhappy
- tiredly complacent
- own and secret
- mysterious metallic
- once sarcastic
- desperate moral
- abrupt internal
- golden and silky
- direct and mysterious
- cynical and sentimental
- past minor
- cool and sedate
- old drowsy
- sober, mature
- myriad keen
- furtive but shrewd
- back inverted
- odd daytime
- jeweled purple
- unformed immature
- restless unsatisfying
- wildly imperfect
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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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