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 sayings
Below is a list of describing words for sayings. 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 sayings:
- ancient and deeply meaningful
- laboriously pregnant
- brilliant and wise
- wise and facetious
- profound axiomatic
- dry and pregnant
- facetious and merry
- pithy proverbial
- philosophical or patriotic
- smart and funny
- quaint, witty
- pregnant and splendid
- several proverbial
- witty and contemptuous
- ingenious and antithetical
- perverse and sinister
- cynical but bright
- rizal proverbial
- utter dark
- famous funny
- homely shrewd
- uncomfortably profound
- useful, pithy
- pithy epigrammatic
- smart or bitter
- queer and childish
- common apocryphal
- material pregnant
- jocular cynical
- harsh and often heartless
- hardy incomprehensible
- presumably authentic
- wild, fond
- best and most expressive
- unclean and untrue
- simple pregnant
- acrimonious and sharp
- malicious and witty
- fewer sharper
- evidently current
- utter odd
- divinely childish
- proverbial or vulgar
- smart witty
- wise and drastic
- dire, hard
- little double-edged
- hard and characteristic
- simplest wisest
- obscure metaphorical
- humorous, epigrammatic
- various glib
- careless, pithy
- mystical or ancient
- hard or capricious
- bright epigrammatic
- individual prophetic
- profound and fertile
- nonsensical, queer
- pithiest and most memorable
- undoubtedly numerous and explicit
- bright, ironical
- ingenious and pertinent
- pithy and racy
- sharp and original
- always pious
- innumerable apt
- foolish commonplace
- legal proverbial
- sundry witty
- new or eccentric
- epigrammatic and incisive
- flippant or smart
- disagreeable and brutal
- --_uncanonical
- divine or authoritative
- terse but meaningless
- rather quaint and witty
- late and funny
- eccentric and sarcastic
- short and important
- witty or pungent
- bright or caustic
- acute, witty and profound
- highly original and brilliant
- low infidel
- dry and often bitter
- innumerable witty
- common, proverbial
- profoundest and most characteristic
- moral and familiar
- comical, humorous
- separate familiar
- evil and scurrilous
- laughingly frank
- parallel scriptural
- familiar pious
- occasionally kindred
- coarse and lewd
- pungent, alarming
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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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