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 reputation

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

  • original ripe
  • unique and shady
  • low-rate intellectual
  • already international
  • original risky
  • deservedly unpleasant
  • neat provincial
  • distinctly unsavory
  • old excellent
  • newfound heroic
  • almost illustrious
  • well-deserved savage
  • carelessly lustful
  • distinctly awful
  • deservedly pure
  • excellent and well-deserved
  • sufficiently ragged
  • deservedly high
  • exterior and unsavory
  • thy questionable
  • rather towering
  • fairly well-deserved
  • widespread onerous
  • mythical or near-mythical
  • alaskan and siberian
  • brilliant and undying
  • wide and enviable
  • unenviable but deserving
  • undiminished european
  • characteristically shady
  • posthumous sentimental
  • already illustrious
  • old and lofty
  • impressive international
  • exterior and historical
  • perfectly undeserved
  • long and well-deserved
  • sinister and murderous
  • rakish, debonair
  • potentially billion-dollar
  • already enviable
  • a--a--medical
  • certainly greater and higher
  • certainly greater
  • wide, popular and professional
  • immense oratorical
  • world-wide scandalous
  • professional, literary or religious
  • quite posthumous
  • panegyrical and international
  • nearly untarnished
  • wide posthumous
  • dubious and exciting
  • high but undeserved
  • already creditable
  • sour and repulsive
  • villainous and unsavory
  • morally unenviable
  • thereby dark
  • social, fashionable
  • undeservedly bad
  • permanent and serious
  • fair national
  • certain belated
  • fabulous, legendary
  • pragmatic, hard-nosed
  • luxurious and glamorous
  • mad but innocent
  • glorious and entirely unearned
  • past and questionable
  • somewhat scary
  • original predatory
  • overall athletic
  • prestigious scholastic
  • well-founded and authoritative
  • noisy and popular
  • high and well-deserved
  • slender poetical
  • considerable and undiminished
  • exceedingly honorable and virtuous
  • colossal and unique
  • similarly evil
  • old and unblemished
  • actual or traditional
  • wide and well-deserved
  • worldwide and pre-eminent
  • odious and infernal
  • inviolable social
  • enviable and well-deserved
  • high-toned scientific
  • widespread evil
  • somewhat sinister and reckless
  • enviable and wide
  • exalted anti-epileptic
  • exceedingly transitory
  • great and not undeserved
  • theatrically fine
  • properly bad
  • essentially contemporary and characteristic
  • essentially contemporary

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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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