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 selfishness
Below is a list of describing words for selfishness. 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 selfishness:
- sordid and hungry
- indolent or insolent
- obdurate and narrow
- utter natural
- chaste and consistent
- simple self-centered
- undisguised hard
- snug exclusive
- intense and unconscious
- unrestricted animal
- obvious wise
- healthy and heroic
- complete and irredeemable
- well-nigh ferocious
- deep-seated, remorseless
- improvident and stupid
- all--merely individual
- limitless national
- narrow, intriguing
- terrible corrosive
- naked, ignorant
- pure unreflective
- infernal, incarnate
- deep, engrossing
- disgusting and inordinate
- monstrous parental
- unutterably cruel
- blind and vile
- innate and brutal
- crafty, sanctimonious
- unlawful and murderous
- specious but transparent
- such timorous
- utter, unworthy
- more calloused
- low, misguided
- simply ethical
- inevitable, equal
- colossal and fiendish
- keen and unconscious
- petty shortsighted
- unconscious, cruel
- inordinate, morbid
- intense and heartless
- quite obstinate
- blind and quite obstinate
- contemptuous and ungrateful
- entirely human-sounding
- fine relentless
- monumental and destructive
- ancient grudging
- invincible gay
- airy and gracious
- excess, gross
- mere refined
- boundless, pitiless
- inexplicable, triumphant
- ecclesiastical, national
- heedless prodigal
- sweet dual
- blandly assertive
- witty and refined
- ludicrous and vain
- honest, unblushing
- hard, instinctive
- refined and unconscious
- resolute and incorrigible
- afraid, utter
- vile, unfathomable
- egotistic or unconscious
- characteristic and profound
- respectively hard
- murderous, fiendish
- complete but unconscious
- deliberate and most repulsive
- ruthless individual
- latent utter
- crafty and servile
- ignoble and unscrupulous
- generalized and deliberate
- corrupt and impudent
- ingenious resolute
- stagnant double
- utter, callous
- sinister and sordid
- past liberal
- serene, inflexible
- plain, rotten
- final remorseless
- narrow and cold-blooded
- involuntary or unconscious
- exclusive and inveterate
- natural sentimental
- pathetic and affectionate
- senseless and unprofitable
- coarse, servile
- low, subtle
- perfect and invincible
- active and youthful
- repulsively human
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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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