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 satire
Below is a list of describing words for satire. 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 satire:
- social pictorial
- gross british
- pleasant financial
- effectively quiet
- frigid sterile
- cheap social
- farcical, humorous
- swift and caustic
- scathing and tremendous
- avenging and pathetic
- energetic and almost bitter
- superficial and rather ephemeral
- delicious, stinging
- direct and subtle
- mutual poignant
- general, oriental
- individual but pretty lusty
- comfortable, even-tempered
- delicate and well-bred
- delightful, good-humored
- arrogant personal
- satirical, personal
- obsolete dramatic
- gross malignant
- such permissible
- finer or nobler
- covert symbolical
- witty and caustic
- infamous, ignoble
- famous tenth
- nicely barbed
- dull and utterly toothless
- slight dangerous
- wickedly self-deprecating
- irreverent and purely fantastic
- pique and public
- perfectly acrid
- perfect and perfectly acrid
- keenest allegorical
- delicate but rather risky
- pictorial social
- pleasing and amusing
- bold and pungent
- capable, good-humored
- grim or serious
- more unintended
- congenial dramatic
- rhetorical or tragic
- infamous ignoble
- severe but grossly indelicate
- fanciful and almost sympathetic
- unforgettable political
- wretched and pointless
- caustic and relentless
- low and insipid
- stinging and shameful
- stinging political
- exquisite and fanciful
- poignant infantile
- serious and purely jocular
- grave ironic
- moral, social and other
- elegant and humorous
- ingenious and good-humored
- rugged and almost unintelligible
- clever but ordinary
- damaging and galling
- comical poetical
- keen but delicate
- allegedly blasphemous
- brilliant or trenchant
- weaker, social
- pungent and resplendent
- provincial and political
- clever and somewhat profane
- keenest and truest
- well-designed but most indelicate
- undated and admirable
- reckless and amusing
- terrible sixth
- french, light-hearted
- vigorous and almost ferocious
- gentle but incisive
- caustic, stinging
- roughly mischievous
- barbed unconscious
- somewhat ponderous and solemn
- pungent and merciless
- charming seventh
- true but brilliant
- charming and most graceful
- talented but terrible
- fancy, stinging
- scathing juvenile
- delicately true
- ethical and reflective
- harmless, good-humored
- malicious but innocent
- quaint popular
- somewhat flippant and irreverent
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
