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 rhymes

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

  • inevitable false
  • happiest triple
  • sweet orphic
  • meek, familiar
  • lawful fourteenth
  • hilarious dirty
  • traditional proverbial
  • funnily bad
  • more, uncouth
  • french didactic
  • unintelligible faulty
  • uniformly true and applicable
  • typical dull
  • triple feminine
  • sweet persistent
  • separate mnemonic
  • ever voiceless
  • extremely rich and unexpected
  • intentionally imperfect
  • random, rollicking
  • strict and fluent
  • colorful, barbarous
  • nonterminal
  • rude inspiring
  • fearfully lame
  • appropriate short
  • harmonious or original
  • long, symphonic
  • declamatory and didactic
  • hackneyed or conventional
  • smooth harmonious
  • shamelessly provincial
  • ceaseless and marvelous
  • occasionally inner
  • frequent and sometimes intricate
  • unfortunately suggestive
  • rough, unobtrusive
  • identical or perfect
  • sweetly balanced
  • facile and fascinating
  • uniformly true
  • particularly precocious
  • nice conscious
  • quick, incomprehensible
  • awkward internal
  • twice happy
  • full consonant
  • simple and frequent
  • barbaric, musical
  • proven�al fourth
  • provencal fourth
  • unnecessary internal
  • mere mellifluous
  • old zodiacal
  • assonantal
  • undiurnal
  • rude rhythmical
  • consonantal and vocalic
  • extremely soft and melodious
  • stinging, pitiful
  • simply sufficient
  • familiar delightful
  • complete caesural
  • difficult double
  • tranquil and continuous
  • sweet melodic
  • rude but wise
  • regular terminal
  • thy elegant
  • sometimes intricate
  • deep autumnal
  • double or feminine
  • strict petrarchan
  • characteristic political
  • irregular and fitful
  • such recurrent
  • fanciful and fantastic
  • consonantal
  • gay italian
  • rich and unexpected
  • single masculine
  • elegant and popular
  • noble heroic
  • obscure and ancient
  • new and baffling
  • disconcerting little
  • skeltonical
  • ancient rustic
  • false and imperfect
  • old anonymous
  • inexcusably bad
  • caesural
  • now hackneyed
  • slightly imperfect
  • merely sufficient
  • sometimes actual
  • sweet sad
  • single acceptable
  • also internal
  • little discernible

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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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