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 romance

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

  • famous religious-historical
  • religious-historical
  • rather soupy
  • marvelous real-life
  • fancy and girlish
  • lively fancy and girlish
  • —paranormal
  • attractive historical
  • always fresh and wonderful
  • pastoral and chivalrous
  • brilliant and very perfect
  • blatantly melodramatic
  • jaunty and inflated
  • bulky historical
  • byronic or modern
  • gifted more
  • wild but wicked
  • terrible medieval
  • religious poetical
  • pleasantly tawdry
  • sublime and special
  • dirty, compelling
  • whole improper
  • exquisitely sad
  • realistic but moderate
  • thy stale
  • delicious, respectful
  • short amatory
  • weird sensational
  • heroical grotesque
  • delightfully exciting and fascinating
  • french allegorical
  • medieval or later german
  • childish, unwritten
  • mysterious and exalted
  • weird zoological
  • imaginative italian
  • sombre and exalted
  • sad and gorgeous
  • unspoken homosexual
  • gentle bookish
  • seventeenth-century pastoral
  • vivid and chivalrous
  • distinctly geographical
  • interesting satirical
  • fashionable pastoral
  • sentimental and refined
  • superb ironic
  • highest mediaeval
  • ingenious and enthralling
  • appeal and poetic
  • poetic and traditional
  • oriental and medieval
  • queer, rhapsodical
  • beauteous, bright
  • madly eloquent
  • captivating historical
  • peculiarly sweet and strange
  • ideological religious
  • lustrous and almost morbid
  • companionable and level-headed
  • strangely companionable and level-headed
  • girlish and enthusiastic
  • shallow real
  • incident--natural
  • lazy, voluptuous
  • decidedly charming
  • such bread-and-butter
  • darker paranormal
  • bright and endless
  • spanish pastoral
  • fantastic and sublime
  • real sappy
  • italian juvenile
  • rousing medieval
  • desperate and passionate
  • promising personal
  • once-in-a-lifetime great
  • tentative middle-aged
  • run-of-the-mill popular
  • provocative, paranormal
  • enjoyable paranormal
  • adventurous paranormal
  • exciting and suspenseful
  • jubilantly sweet
  • impertinent and happily ephemeral
  • happily ephemeral
  • sentimental metrical
  • classical or colonial
  • virile, realistic
  • circumspect historical
  • secret or wild
  • impassioned french
  • richly symbolical
  • french and celtic
  • complete and unscrupulous
  • wretched and improbable
  • shy and wistful
  • little interstate
  • always noble and handsome

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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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