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 similarities
Below is a list of describing words for similarities. 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 similarities:
- closest behavioural
- assuredly suggestive
- assuredly suggestive and interesting
- amazing and almost unanimous
- occasional misleading
- twenty-decimal
- geologic and ecological
- structural or anatomical
- refined or unconscious
- superficial and apparent
- purely superficial and apparent
- tempting nominal
- smaller and certainly questionable
- gross and accidental
- certain boring
- subspectral
- least genetic
- superficial phonetic
- straight one-for-one
- subtle, pregnant
- vague, recognizable
- striking and specific
- striking topographical
- illusive but superficial
- homogeneous, expressionless
- likewise frequent and striking
- singular typical
- limited or partial
- fundamental, all-pervading
- apparent essential
- convincing structural
- greatest phonetic
- remarkably general
- strong statistical
- almost faithful and exact
- occasional and fleeting
- scene--general
- greater juridical
- indeed astounding
- initial superficial
- real or anatomical
- greatest, darkest
- certainly questionable
- striking thematic
- fairly approximate
- basic and undeniable
- apparently thorough
- gross morphological
- enough cultural
- certain worldwide
- liritual
- deep, behavioral
- eerily striking
- superficial visual
- co�incidental
- constant and remarkable
- fully intentional
- closest verbal
- accidental phonetic
- indescribable hereditary
- creepy, unnatural
- gradually remoter
- same or rather greater
- remarkable physiognomical
- vague and insignificant
- otherwise sufficient
- almost faithful
- sufficient basal
- certain seeming
- mere adventitious
- certain devious
- striking cultural
- meaningless verbal
- striking or significant
- glaring, blinding
- short, striking
- considerable statistical
- strict and entire
- psychological or mental
- curious and uncanny
- great grammatical
- certain biochemical
- certain etymological
- surely strong
- evident artistic
- subtle but definite
- peculiar fundamental
- certain biologic
- often puzzling
- obvious stylistic
- considerable superficial
- frequent and striking
- likewise frequent
- wonderful and astonishing
- startling physical
- deep and basic
- strong general
- remarkable general
- strange and almost unaccountable
- nameless, intangible
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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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