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 somebody
Below is a list of describing words for somebody. 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 somebody:
- passionate semicircular
- bearded and mustachioed
- fearful, feminine
- --belial
- perhaps loving
- mad and fried
- single dark-haired
- maybe spanking
- always troubling
- unknown and vague
- always rasping
- wayward, grown-up
- indefinite, intangible
- accidental and maybe crippling
- maybe crippling
- possibly amusing
- ever busted
- bronzed, good-looking
- damn loud
- doubtful, flagging
- seriously maimed
- tall and furious
- dreadful afraid
- terrible afraid
- one--christobal
- other one--christobal
- nice invisible
- locally immortal
- just loving
- always afraid
- therefore desirable
- bloody true
- straight sure
- horribly afraid
- still nameless
- always flattering
- handsome present
- certain saucy
- cheap and simple
- spectacular meal
- terribly certain
- downright glad
- always disturbing
- powerful glad
- technically possible
- always fancy
- already late
- vague but powerful
- absolutely positive
- always loving
- jolly good
- little afraid
- probably afraid
- certain ingenious
- also possible
- afraid
- just afraid
- passionately loving
- mighty quick
- mighty busy
- unusually persistent
- vile, wicked
- big, stout
- much afraid
- stout, healthy
- just possible
- almost fancy
- certain nameless
- glad
- mustachioed
- more afraid
- social and financial
- little closer
- truly loving
- poor forlorn
- somewhat old-fashioned
- just glad
- crippling
- other nameless
- impetuous little
- little happy
- announced
- rather fancy
- befogged
- nearer and nearer
- nergal
- little strange
- mighty glad
- sure
- little fair
- loving
- much interested
- fast-talking
- trusting
- own miserable
- lop
- damned sure
- pelting
- quite sure
- well worth
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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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