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 responsibility

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

  • initial and ultimate
  • rampant, social
  • full, sole and personal
  • ultimate and heavy
  • additional onerous
  • parental or grandparental
  • peculiar and inescapable
  • sole and personal
  • important and sensitive
  • official and maternal
  • primary, definite
  • potentially awesome
  • awful and ancestral
  • sole parental
  • carefree, sole
  • guilty and awful
  • ethical sacrament--personal
  • ethical and eugenic
  • new and almost unbearable
  • uneasy and unwelcome
  • once unfelt and unsatisfied
  • once unfelt
  • much nominal
  • principal day-to-day
  • tremendous and sacred
  • sacred and impelling
  • appalling and inescapable
  • weighty and most sacred
  • dual sacred
  • tremendous ethical
  • main editorial
  • totally unbearable
  • former, human
  • thought-out individual
  • original and vicarious
  • hitherto vicarious
  • unrestricted vicarious
  • heavy and awful
  • undivided moral
  • human, moral
  • inescapable personal
  • onerous and unwanted
  • irreducible ethical
  • heavy and cautious
  • loving, deep
  • gravest and most joyful
  • primary, unspoken
  • terrific ceremonial
  • modest, momentary
  • immediate day-to-day
  • awful and frightening
  • heavy and painful
  • persistent, cruel
  • joint ministerial
  • airy and unreal
  • exceptionally awful
  • heavy and grave
  • naked and homeless
  • civic and collective
  • responsibility--partial
  • governmental and individual
  • enormous and most complex
  • sexual and paternal
  • individual and continuous
  • former collective
  • primary and individual
  • sacred and everlasting
  • personal and entire
  • anyhow abundant
  • ultimate editorial
  • wrong and moral
  • impossible and moral
  • grave and unceasing
  • unqualified and undivided
  • unceasing and immeasurable
  • defective, parental
  • clear-cut and distinct
  • real, constitutional
  • quite partial
  • weighty national
  • ceremonial and high
  • exceptional and unremitting
  • --er--personal
  • equal and individual
  • entirely supportable
  • sole ethical
  • favorite point--personal
  • point--personal
  • serious and active
  • centralized and single
  • delicate and large
  • crime--personal
  • supervisory or managerial
  • avowed entire
  • primary and serious
  • conscious parental
  • heaviest human
  • great and thoroughly congenial
  • direct and malicious
  • always deeper and keener

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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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