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 roots
Below is a list of describing words for roots. 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 roots:
- stewed orange
- gnarled great
- great entangled
- hard and stringy
- persistent, prying
- identical verbal
- identical structural
- familiar edible
- hungry thirsty
- lean and high
- old, fantastic
- ancient wondrous
- cool greasy
- large moldy
- gnarled and enormous
- pitiful withered
- next fat
- down tenacious
- true demonstrable
- strong and observant
- sour, aromatic
- equally arcane
- biliteral and triliteral
- curious open-air
- curious knotty
- deep immovable
- down deeper
- particularly large and ancient
- gnarled tangled
- famous forked
- few snake-like
- deeper and striking
- tentative sensory
- apparently transitory
- feral biological
- little and apparently transitory
- numerous adventitious
- annual wiry
- comfortably gnarled
- principal edible
- unexpectedly abrasive
- long bacterial
- long, pallid
- pungent fleshy
- fleshy magenta
- gastronomically important
- thick and relatively solid
- past squamosal
- top and frantic
- white and very fragrant
- slender, gnarled
- conceptual and emotional
- slow-growing edible
- fleshy, milky
- gnarled, obscene
- remarkably large and thick
- tasty fresh
- short-lived perennial
- blue secondary
- deep biennial
- pale underground
- long perennial
- basic mythic
- fibrous perennial
- gnarled, brief
- fibrous annual
- historical, philosophical and theological
- biennial, fleshy
- few fibrous
- regular or certain
- small fibrous
- pink or gray
- coloured, handsome
- large insipid
- vigorous and penetrating
- fleshy, conic
- thicker and larger
- perennial, poisonous
- thin and single
- perennial, fleshy
- high knotted
- stocky bitter
- tough, fine
- enormous and slippery
- psychological and psychophysiological
- downward and coarse
- fibrous and fleshy
- infantile erotic
- large entangled
- straight pallid
- simple fibrous
- horizontal aromatic
- thick perennial
- brittle, fibrous
- stupid shallow
- hard crooked
- dark and light-colored
- old fantastic
- fibrous red
- class=mqt>�real
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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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