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 resemblance
Below is a list of describing words for resemblance. 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 resemblance:
- remote and ill-defined
- vague and distinct
- vague gross
- ghostly thin
- strong generic
- sufficiently appreciable
- initial facial
- distant or general
- physical or philosophical
- superficial but striking
- distinct familial
- faint, generic
- faint and terrible
- faint superficial
- crazy and astounding
- strict universal
- reasonable facial
- faint and very rude
- closest general
- actually deceptive
- odious and grotesque
- slightly bogus
- definite facial
- strong superficial
- considerable overall
- faint but nightmarish
- rude and accidental
- dull and dim
- featural
- feeble and doubtful
- gross and general
- merely exact
- vague and inexpensive
- fallacious external
- rude and diminutive
- bedraggled and distant
- imperfect and merely accidental
- external and approximate
- purely external and approximate
- chief and most pure
- strong facial
- strong and frightful
- subtle but noticeable
- striking thematic
- overall, superficial
- wrinkled and degenerate
- much familial
- curious external
- unmistakable, sensational
- apparent familial
- striking and frightening
- manifestly accidental
- preferred mere
- remarkable pathological
- enough lexical and morphological
- enough lexical
- lexical and morphological
- external formal
- faint and controversial
- superficial or distant
- striking and unaccountable
- odd and fortuitous
- vague but undeniable
- necessary true
- fanciful and distant
- slight and possibly imaginative
- possibly imaginative
- closer external
- curious and often brief
- unaccountable, fascinating
- strong elementary
- dreary superficial
- slightest superficial
- faint and diminutive
- variable protective
- considerable superficial
- uncommonly exact
- original or fundamental
- delicate and deceptive
- amazing and almost indistinguishable
- abnormal maddening
- striking geographic
- closest anatomical
- partial and painful
- natural and most palpable
- national physiognomical
- family physiognomical
- sufficient external
- partial and often accidental
- faint and disreputable
- nameless sympathetic
- slightest generic
- striking and correct
- less exterior
- singular and disquieting
- rapidly discerning
- terrible and striking
- obvious generic
- actual or visible
- advantageous and superficial
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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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