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 resistance

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

  • hopeless jewish
  • passive, futile
  • long-standing passive
  • perverse but powerful
  • rally serious
  • ready and stern
  • negligible electrical
  • noble but useless
  • childish but strangely prescient
  • violent but unarmed
  • tiny partisan
  • meta-national
  • energetic and gleeful
  • variable electrical
  • superhuman and successful
  • despairing, grievous
  • temporary, desperate
  • intermittent passive
  • equal and safe
  • wholesale passive
  • obstinate and open
  • bold or effectual
  • enormous sidelong
  • feeble, instinctive
  • low ohmic
  • maximum frictional
  • open and unjust
  • tenacious and heroic
  • nevertheless spirited and obstinate
  • nevertheless spirited
  • courageous and splendid
  • ohmic
  • low internal
  • peaceful or passive
  • immune or genetic
  • ineffective and half-hearted
  • decent and even obstinate
  • long or protracted
  • internal chinese
  • stubborn, passive
  • strenuous passive
  • indefatigable, strenuous
  • stubborn, unaccommodating
  • previous effectual
  • heavy, amorphous
  • steadfast and invincible
  • courageous but fruitless
  • vehement and hopeless
  • fearfully obstinate
  • stubborn intractable
  • initial static
  • widespread underground
  • physical or even psychological
  • conscious nor subconscious
  • hopeless but desperate
  • flashy and temporary
  • passive commercial
  • strangely prescient
  • obstinate passive
  • possible frictional
  • least frictional
  • obstinate and vigorous
  • effectual passive
  • desperate and quite natural
  • vain and disastrous
  • tragic poetic
  • substantial and consistent
  • great and variable
  • somewhat great and variable
  • somewhat great
  • transverse and torsional
  • tensile, transverse and torsional
  • middle-class and parliamentary
  • flaming, wrathful
  • sullen and resolute
  • solid, heroic
  • almost pointless
  • sheer passive
  • brave but ineffectual
  • initial popular
  • taut inner
  • stolid unyielding
  • contrary, nonviolent
  • unjust, nonviolent
  • immune nor genetic
  • well-organized nonviolent
  • emphatic and not impotent
  • fruitless and fatal
  • solitary stubborn
  • slight cortical
  • certainly spirited
  • stolid, passive
  • sympathetic, inflexible
  • instinctive stubborn
  • sourly savage
  • resolute and surprising
  • obdurate, desperate
  • disorganized but desperate
  • protracted and often successful
  • general and mute

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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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