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 request

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

  • prior informational
  • well-placed official
  • disagreeable or inconvenient
  • untoward, unseasonable
  • ill-timed impertinent
  • direct, legal
  • impossibly extravagant
  • solemn and last
  • friendly philanthropic
  • speedy and solemn
  • illogical or nonsensical
  • mad and devilish
  • seeming reasonable
  • so-called preposterous
  • polite and urgent
  • extraordinary and even alarming
  • curious and last
  • urgent but foolish
  • previous transdepartmental
  • embarrassing, last-minute
  • almost unexplained
  • urgent and heartfelt
  • natural and exceedingly insignificant
  • flagrantly unreasonable
  • incontestably genuine
  • calmer, sincere
  • prodigious, bold
  • conceivable impossible
  • perfectly proper and natural
  • urgent and unselfish
  • last modest
  • reasonable and not unexpected
  • equally curious and significant
  • unconditional peremptory
  • loyal and reasonable
  • weighty and urgent
  • next surprising
  • persistent, illiterate
  • irrelevant and contradictory
  • perr-sonal
  • small and rather quaint
  • >ditional
  • personal and unofficial
  • perverse final
  • urgent, urgent
  • outrageous or improper
  • usual explicit
  • ill-timed, impertinent
  • sincere but lighthearted
  • “really tempting
  • urgent and ceaseless
  • equally irrational and barbarous
  • irrational and barbarous
  • unusual and wholly preposterous
  • last and sincere
  • weighty, grave
  • humble and reasonable
  • individual and practical
  • hazardous and audacious
  • elaborately humble
  • respectful electoral
  • unfinished but evident
  • natural and apparently gracious
  • extremely nervy
  • evasive but perfectly intelligible
  • feeble, bright-eyed
  • same uncivil
  • simple confidential
  • singular, heart-rending
  • difficult and peremptory
  • rather difficult and peremptory
  • quite obsequious
  • urgent and latest
  • perfectly ridiculous and unconscionable
  • desirable and reasonable
  • invariable and invariably apologetic
  • invariably apologetic
  • mysterious, unsigned
  • ready and joyful
  • unique and trivial
  • humiliating direct
  • preposterous, absurd
  • doubly unusual
  • bold and brief
  • pious and chivalrous
  • final, urgent
  • similar urgent
  • particular and unanimous
  • seeming strange
  • lawful or honest
  • truly peculiar
  • insolent and seditious
  • imprudent and thoughtless
  • transdepartmental
  • strangely urgent
  • innocent, small
  • exceedingly insignificant
  • sane, everyday
  • polite but urgent
  • simple, enormous

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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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