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 reticence
Below is a list of describing words for reticence. 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 reticence:
- stubborn public
- vividly conscious
- younger sexual
- proud suspicious
- modest and severe
- philippine gubernatorial
- wilfully unjustified
- reasonable and well-bred
- natural and dainty
- foolish and secretive
- successful priest-confessional
- priest-confessional
- unexplained and apparently unexplainable
- curious and unpopular
- natural academic
- insurmountable nervous
- heroic and vigilant
- unselfish and self-respecting
- admirable and impenetrable
- natural prudent
- effective, useful
- prudent diplomatic
- dreadfully competent
- apparently unexplainable
- grim, moody
- certainly uncharacteristic
- characteristic old-fashioned
- hideous and constitutional
- stern, impenetrable
- extreme general
- earlier comparative
- tragic and almost diabolical
- bald and hungry
- decent professional
- such coy
- strange, watchful
- native and habitual
- common diplomatic
- cautious and respectful
- certain moody
- curious and almost inexplicable
- peculiarly victorian
- puseyitical
- rather stricter
- curious, perplexing
- sweet, uncomplaining
- habitual personal
- grave, grand
- odd, sudden
- due artistic
- perfectly understandable
- fine and sweet
- due filial
- much manifest
- calm and ladylike
- same commendable
- severe and classic
- apparently unpremeditated
- mysterious personal
- sacred and delicate
- peculiar fine
- usual stoical
- usual self-contained
- equally cheerful
- curious and persistent
- almost victorian
- little decent
- quiet and decent
- still wiser
- same shy
- certain incomprehensible
- sane and natural
- usual prudent
- rather tardy
- hard, callous
- such unjustifiable
- curious modern
- grave and gloomy
- usual modest
- slight dark
- extremely cautious
- usual impassive
- certain modest
- perhaps natural
- little conscious
- practised such
- singular and remarkable
- least selfish
- usual professional
- shy, sweet
- such respectful
- certain native
- admirable literary
- sweet, generous
- certain exquisite
- such commendable
- usual british
- cold, haughty
- early georgian
- wise and discreet
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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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