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 size
Below is a list of describing words for size. 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 size:
- one-sixth natural
- old-fashioned, great
- initial subatomic
- ordinary and convenient
- same and smallest
- exactly miniature
- larger apparent
- twice natural
- present diminutive
- roughly molecular
- one-twentieth natural
- nor�mal human
- original negligible
- normal sturdy
- taller, human
- enormous and insupportable
- splendid, vibrant
- reasonable but not splendid
- twice actual
- nearly actual
- enormous, incredible
- largest characteristic
- apply transparent
- minimum functional
- tremendous and familiar
- relative small
- perceptible angular
- proportionally lesser
- certain and rather small
- three-fourths natural
- actual correct
- male, small
- totally stunning
- present molecular
- former tiny
- larger, original
- properly terrifying
- effectively vast
- one-sixth actual
- sceptically moderate
- female, natural
- visible and legible
- distinctly visible and legible
- double natural
- markedly larger
- seemingly diminutive
- fifteenth actual
- double linear
- twice normal
- twice human
- large or moderate
- instantly discernible
- lesser relative
- great but empty
- tv-commercial
- roughly standard
- true, enormous
- tiny apparent
- exorbitant and phenomenal
- usual and marketable
- minimum practical
- almost treelike
- natural or colossal
- fourth natural
- obviously smaller
- moderate or large
- unusual and truly gigantic
- neat, smallish
- unbounded and unparalleled
- quite colossal
- smaller average
- huge, fragile
- unusually palatial
- full diminutive
- apparent small
- dimensional, full
- great and simply large
- full and former
- true vast
- greater nor lesser
- optimum transportable
- largest standard
- nearly alarming
- much optimum
- sheer, brawny
- exact and massive
- livid and twice normal
- former, smaller
- five-by-eight-inch
- altogether diminutive
- fashionable and unnatural
- abnormally large or small
- inconvenient and consequently expensive
- typical and economic
- necessarily small and inconvenient
- appreciable average
- much-coveted fashionable
- huge or moderate
- great nor too small
- mere larger
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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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