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 search
Below is a list of describing words for search. 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 search:
- active but fruitless
- thorough but fruitless
- curious and ultimately futile
- diligent and vain
- long and almost fruitless
- fruitless and vexatious
- mad, intensive
- horrible, pathetic
- immediate and intensive
- fast global
- open-minded and systematic
- long-term, open-minded and systematic
- comprehensive and resourceful
- grim and frantic
- dangerous and probably futile
- rigorous private
- feverishly impatient
- anxious and spirited
- fresh and useless
- arduous, tedious
- repetitive, electronic
- entire twelve-year
- enormous and urgent
- intensive and difficult
- ultimately repetitive
- complex but ultimately repetitive
- diligent and studious
- energetic but fruitless
- painful and diligent
- faithfully eager
- moderately thorough
- rapid and somewhat perfunctory
- special manual
- fruitless and ludicrous
- doubtful mental
- angry, systematic
- completely thorough
- swift, illegal
- utmost painful
- immediate and diligent
- thorough and fruitless
- secret but exhaustive
- ceaseless and fruitless
- anxious but futile
- gruesome and unavailing
- vain and toilsome
- possibly vain
- long but unsuccessful
- exhaustive preparatory
- quick but efficient
- intense and thorough
- constant never-ending
- diligent but fruitless
- so-far fruitless
- lengthy random
- slow, door-to-door
- reasonably dispassionate
- exacting genetic
- last methodical
- half-hearted and unsuccessful
- ceaseless, frightening
- nervous visual
- frantic fifteen-minute
- completely ill-advised
- clumsy and completely ill-advised
- continuous, hopeless
- electronic and visual
- intense and futile
- still fruitless
- new and absolutely thorough
- apothecarical
- self-denial and profound
- burial, diligent
- careful and relentless
- restless and fruitless
- anxious and almost hopeless
- endless, unprofitable
- good prayerful
- urgent perpetual
- further painstaking
- desperate and romantic
- continual obscure
- diligent and toilsome
- gallant and dauntless
- continual uneasy
- diligent and almost microscopic
- dull and moody
- careful extraterrestrial
- continuous, desperate
- extensive archaeological
- three-dimensional spiral
- strict and extensive
- general and rigorous
- immediate and thorough
- merely thorough
- dim, atavistic
- difficult and heartfelt
- long, quixotic
- ideal aerial
- strenuous all-night
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.
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