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 return
Below is a list of describing words for return. 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 return:
- annual joyous
- eminently welcome
- visible and cheerful
- ceremonial and triumphant
- shaky but fair
- reluctantly polite
- incredibly speedy
- temporary, interested
- timid appealing
- immediate and hasty
- same ten-hour
- safe and triumphal
- diurnal painful
- hard flagging
- happy chief
- steadier financial
- survival and safe
- weary, late-night
- spiritually queer
- immediate and safe
- early triumphant
- tardy and fatal
- otherwise fortunate and happy
- glen--final
- glorious, eschatological
- brief, dreamlike
- fair brunette
- ignominious and disastrous
- late and drunken
- straightforward and decent
- larger and speedier
- inexpensive and unopposed
- frustrating thy
- weal and safe
- weary due
- gradual and insidious
- interesting parliamentary
- permanent or adequate
- equally tedious and difficult
- ultimate and last
- sudden and quaint
- quick and abundant
- thy safe
- last consolidated
- brief and ignominious
- sick and uncertain
- easy, invisible
- hasty, staggering
- unexpected but nonetheless welcome
- steady and frugal
- strangely belated
- apparently joyous
- triply potent
- finnish major
- quick and warm
- full, cathartic
- eternal and infinitely various
- superb, clever
- fortunate thy
- great and very oppressive
- tardy and distant
- wistful momentary
- direct and fertile
- unexpected and safe
- eventual and very tardy
- still riskier
- imperial dead
- strong, few
- unexpected offensive
- compulsory but peaceful
- speedy or safe
- safe or speedy
- somewhat variable and uncertain
- general, immediate
- fatal, unconscious
- swift and glad
- quick or considerable
- faint and impatient
- momentary and vigorous
- sure financial
- least net
- sole commensurate
- tumultuous, inopportune
- equally noisy and cheerful
- modest but unfailing
- large and sure
- sulky and morose
- wondrous slow
- fair, honest and impartial
- speedy safe
- own speedier
- fullest approximate
- weak, inadequate
- good or adequate
- graceful and royal
- particular satiric
- evidently purposeful
- own unhindered
- ludicrously swift
- suggestive official
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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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