Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 relatives

Below is a list of describing words for relatives. 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 relatives:

  • deserving german
  • blind collateral
  • assorted female
  • closest animal
  • numerous beloved
  • nearest intellectual
  • closest wild
  • more dormant
  • probably distant
  • well-meaning male
  • nearer male
  • remoter and nearer
  • dependent female
  • rich and remote
  • nearest and most affectionate
  • probably other and remoter
  • probably other
  • immediate female
  • bulky mammal
  • unseen but possibly belligerent
  • infamous and hypocritical
  • envious or untrustworthy
  • jealous evil-minded
  • own and collateral
  • fond or foolish
  • relatives--real
  • officiously ambitious
  • hairy, uncouth
  • bold and bright-eyed
  • immensely honorable
  • elderly tyrannical
  • coloured and opaque
  • nearest and most beloved
  • unkind and disdainful
  • junior male
  • impoverished noble
  • last pro-castro
  • sexually compatible
  • obscure and numerous
  • impertinent and greedy
  • invalid female
  • nobly partisan
  • well-meaning but perhaps overzealous
  • rapacious, intriguing
  • gaudy female
  • credulous male
  • innumerable powerful
  • unscrupulous respectable
  • prosperous and sympathetic
  • powerful, reptilian
  • your--er--justly respectful
  • unpretentious but highly intellectual
  • deluded female
  • estimable deceased
  • worthy warm-hearted
  • negligent male
  • nearest and most distant
  • opulent but objectionable
  • sick or unsuccessful
  • therefore adoptive
  • consumptive, dyspeptic and neurotic
  • quite high-up
  • impoverished but amiable
  • various paternal
  • wicked or disagreeable
  • poorer single
  • distant avian
  • away objectionable
  • dishonest and villainous
  • later paternal
  • remotest collateral
  • indignant masculine
  • simply contradictory
  • anxious and unsuspecting
  • wearisome female
  • distant and improvident
  • industrious but poor
  • migratory male
  • sad but interested
  • warlike and jealous
  • immediate extinct
  • mentally diseased or defective
  • poor and disreputable
  • quieter female
  • undoubtedly nearest
  • nearest unmarried
  • proud female
  • nearest male
  • own nearest
  • distant prospective
  • occasionally closer
  • possibly belligerent
  • odd and unfamiliar
  • nearer european
  • nearest female
  • disgusting agricultural
  • eligible female
  • perennially underemployed
  • barbarous young
  • rich older

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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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