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 similes
Below is a list of describing words for similes. 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 similes:
- apt and memorable
- fitting and original
- remarkably fitting and original
- profane and absurd
- false and gigantic
- inappropriate theatrical
- old-fashioned mythological
- prosaic and domestic
- somewhat prosaic and domestic
- therefore absurd
- pictorial and therefore absurd
- delightful, fantastic
- fine, appropriate
- other epithetal
- vulgar and outworn
- epithetal
- trite and time-honored
- characteristic and drastic
- pertinent and poetical
- plain forceful
- expressive, happy
- remarkably fitting
- faint but truthful
- intolerable fancy
- intelligible and appealing
- beautiful and audacious
- natural but not flippant
- weak and well-worn
- suitable and sufficiently strong
- whole sundry
- erudite or scientific
- apparent and natural
- ridiculously belated
- incongruous and impertinent
- fitting condemnatory
- exquisite but familiar
- agreeably literary
- unique and incomprehensible
- far-fetched and quaint
- quaint and pertinent
- egyptian verbal
- unusually apt
- earthy western
- aptly fragile
- phylosophical
- altogether apt
- ceaseless and stale
- unpleasantly apt
- grotesque and familiar
- suitably graphic
- animated, bold
- vivid and quite apt
- piquant and wise
- terse organic
- frequent, rich
- uncomfortably apt
- vulgar but happy
- slightly vulgar but happy
- natural and unique
- last shaggy
- successful poetic
- delightfully quaint and characteristic
- highly colloquial
- apt and appropriate
- fine and deservedly popular
- fascinating but irrelevant
- quaint and striking
- new vernal
- now chemical
- more self-sustaining
- commonplace and hackneyed
- same inexpensive
- common buddhist
- well-worn and familiar
- other pejorative
- good swift
- exquisitely comic
- beautifully apt
- “medical and surgical
- admirably vigorous
- rough physical
- single felicitous
- altogether proper
- same withered
- curiously inverted
- such illustrative
- proper poetic
- sometimes humorous
- apt and beautiful
- many trite
- apt and striking
- somewhat far-fetched
- graphic and truthful
- chaste and classic
- other abundant
- many apt
- quite apt
- beautiful and effective
- such instructive
- old proverbial
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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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