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 source
Below is a list of describing words for source. 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 source:
- vital and endless
- plentiful and clean
- anomalous infrared
- cheap, plentiful and clean
- built-in ultra-violet
- tiny, inexhaustible
- experimental radiational
- important freshwater
- insufficient native
- fundamental and only natural
- ultimate common
- noble and inexhaustible
- primal, inconceivable
- embarrassingly rich
- unsuspected ancestral
- later major
- unquestionably dubious
- unknown and unquestionably dubious
- secret but trustworthy
- rich dietary
- real reliable
- closest and most accessible
- hitherto fruitful
- fresh and all-powerful
- fullest and cheapest
- common but exceedingly ancient
- unconscious but real
- inexhaustible celestial
- transient and trifling
- steady and quite dependable
- knowledgeable primary
- common and durable
- apparent constant
- impressive and potent
- elusive signal
- same briny
- doubtful and impure
- certain and copious
- sufficiently compact
- constant and highest
- pure and inexhaustible
- reilly open
- persistent, rhythmic
- singular, primary
- higher or external
- plausible internal
- reliable anonymous
- central, common
- spurious signal
- rich and unfailing
- obscure muscular
- massively reputable
- strong possible
- voiceless and unseen
- separate and steady
- normally available
- malicious and untrustworthy
- old-fashioned but inexhaustible
- further fleeting
- vague but ample
- surprisingly certain
- new and surprisingly certain
- chief and most convenient
- largest and most subtle
- greater demonic
- prolific and accessible
- valuable nutritional
- small but reliable
- secondary high-power
- probably foul
- internal and probably foul
- cheap, local
- constant, reliable
- unfortunate, unseen
- primitive and remote
- magical electrical
- utterably dependable
- private, unlimited
- inexpensive, safe
- unsuspected and astonishing
- fruitful, emotional
- slow-moving signal
- built-in radioactive
- single, unquestioned
- serious and perhaps imminent
- inconceivably voluble
- sure and respectable
- earliest and most indispensable
- decidedly authentic
- demonstrably reliable
- surest and most fruitful
- common immediate
- superior and unknown
- essential and inexhaustible
- far-off common
- familiar tangible
- ever prolific
- monstrous and perpetual
- fruitful and constant
- endless and hopelessly bitter
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
