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 reluctance
Below is a list of describing words for reluctance. 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 reluctance:
- surely feigned
- intimate considerable
- great and squeamish
- previously british
- obvious, painful
- overt, genuine
- usual grudging
- extreme and almost irrational
- rather least
- extreme and voluble
- unexplainable but powerful
- cultural and public
- sudden, squeamish
- curious playful
- sharp and exquisite
- genuine and feminine
- inexplicable and amusing
- slight but temporary
- veritable sick
- bitter and entire
- sad, unused
- pained, involuntary
- strange and manifest
- singular but instinctive
- excessive and invariable
- purely indolent and ignorant
- purely indolent
- evident but baffling
- noisy and acrobatic
- slight and feigned
- obstinate inner
- bitter, sick
- great and very evident
- secret and scornful
- inexpressible and unconquerable
- strange and insurmountable
- curious despairing
- relatively extreme
- next obstinate
- long and visible
- unaffected and even morbid
- clear, sincere
- strange but strong
- noble grave
- instinctive unreasonable
- hard and brazen
- sudden, obstinate
- slow, staid
- deep, inertial
- own unresolved
- deliberately obvious
- queer inner
- indefinable, illogical
- deep-set inner
- dim, unreasoning
- momentous, undeniable
- initial feminine
- customary civilized
- natural and completely understandable
- great and avowed
- culpable and criminal
- obvious and resentful
- evident shy
- strong and very natural
- extremely admirable
- justifiable editorial
- almost manifest
- greatest and most painful
- innate proud
- natural proud
- evident and genuine
- stubborn and persistent
- much coy
- much feigned
- carnal natural
- general extreme
- indolent and ignorant
- certain understandable
- bitter rebellious
- almost sentient
- possessive, protective
- perhaps superstitious
- peculiar guilty
- obvious and severe
- proper and orthodox
- insuperable physical
- stiff, furry
- furious angry
- much heartfelt
- more principled
- fully understandable
- almost unconquerable
- apparent official
- shy, girlish
- usual rural
- slow and sullen
- almost obvious
- much respectful
- great and natural
- great evident
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
