Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 sentence

Below is a list of describing words for sentence. 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 sentence:

  • intelligible, intelligent
  • solemn individual
  • curiously plausible
  • needlessly formal
  • absolute indeterminate
  • final explanatory
  • markedly severe
  • clear and civilised
  • mysterious and apparently meaningless
  • blithe, crisp
  • victoriously intricate
  • final irreversible
  • rome--final
  • serious and positive
  • single pithy
  • last bald
  • unmarked and undistinguished
  • secret but irrevocable
  • partial and ambiguous
  • brilliant cartesian
  • quite short and easy
  • plain additional
  • single, casual
  • concise and difficult
  • dull, incomparable
  • savory and solemn
  • gloomy and true
  • entire and regular
  • appeal, unerring
  • ferocious and muffled
  • particularly well-balanced
  • absurd, shameful
  • minimum mandatory
  • simple inaccurate
  • awfully striking
  • indirect, abstract
  • fairly lenient
  • comprehensive and pithy
  • smallest criminal
  • direct or inverted
  • possibly cloying
  • critically ambiguous
  • single, understandable
  • simple, bitter
  • ridiculous or incongruous
  • vindictive capital
  • literary or colloquial
  • explicit conditional
  • historic judicial
  • passe severe
  • intentionally enigmatical
  • faithful and irrevocable
  • negative and definitive
  • moderately grammatical
  • buoyant and immortal
  • strictly convertible
  • startling, pregnant
  • tedious weary
  • scarcely milder
  • amusingly significant
  • divine and powerful
  • regular and absolute
  • short and mysterious
  • single unscriptural
  • brief but far-reaching
  • otherwise noteworthy
  • vivid, soulful
  • wholly inconsequential
  • non-custodial
  • single colloquial
  • final and unanimous
  • simple declarative
  • good, meaty
  • original nine-month
  • minimum ten-year
  • crucial, incomplete
  • degrading and demeaning
  • complete, coherent
  • crucial, accusatory
  • two-year criminal
  • shamefully unjust
  • deeply simple
  • occasional glum
  • minimum twenty-year
  • fairly articulate
  • coherent and fairly articulate
  • full grammatical
  • stiff custodial
  • gaunt german
  • pompous last
  • erratic black
  • pronouncing formal
  • long, well-rounded
  • awfully guttural
  • simply graven
  • single occasional
  • iniquitous and unfounded
  • astounding, stupefying
  • ambiguous or very erroneous
  • inverted or difficult

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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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