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 simplicity
Below is a list of describing words for simplicity. 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 simplicity:
- unconscious and good-natured
- quiet wide-eyed
- smooth astonishing
- massive and yet inscrutable
- almost candid
- marvellously tasteful
- delicious and lustrous
- naked and most disgusting
- rustic and martial
- abnormal and entirely misleading
- idyllical
- provincial and primitive
- cold doric
- primitive, rough
- stark functional
- enormous and original
- appalling youthful
- admirable pompous
- perfect and good-natured
- pre-sartorial
- entire and unaffected
- somewhat idyllic
- conceptual or organizational
- naked and appalling
- blended girlish
- unaffected and sometimes pathetic
- utmost cheerful
- humble virgin
- democratic and childlike
- abashed but absolute
- severe, ecclesiastical
- austere but expensive
- utmost republican
- simple, meek
- stark and elegant
- starkly ornamental
- terrible and infantile
- wistful and impassioned
- diplomatic overt
- august and austere
- crisp, brutal
- breathless and majestic
- almost stark
- unreal and sentimental
- primordial, pastoral
- permanent definite
- amiable and girlish
- cheerful and cultured
- apostolical and most ancient
- refined republican
- complete boyish
- much plebeian
- noble and antique
- clumsy and rustic
- fabulous primitive
- pristine dramatic
- genuine, severe
- truly newtonian
- quaint iambic
- humane and humorous
- straightforward, humane and humorous
- utmost apostolic
- grand, classical
- direct and sunny
- seemingly native
- querulous, childish
- sure questionable
- naked, primeval
- precise and rustic
- unaffected and picturesque
- sweet, divine
- refined and severe
- similar cunning
- almost poverty-stricken
- ominous and terrifying
- almost emblematic
- neat easy
- spectacular, luminous
- dreadfully stark
- such trusting
- stunning, deceptive
- naked and elegant
- whole stark
- barren and stern
- indeed jeffersonian
- wide, severe
- easy and forthright
- childlike, savage
- infantile and almost incredible
- fresh, artless
- childlike, unconscious
- grave, antique
- solemn, blinking
- extreme and straight
- strange and almost oppressive
- calm and almost childlike
- truly sculptural
- unconscious and serious
- naked and golden
- stern radical
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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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