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 spectacle
Below is a list of describing words for spectacle. 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 spectacle:
- weird and astounding
- pallid former
- fine and fascinating
- quaint and gaudy
- bluest, bluest
- always impressive and beautiful
- beguiling and fascinating
- familiar annual
- exhilarating popular
- superb and frightful
- magnificent, monstrous
- astonishing and even menacing
- lurid but disordered
- noble and even sublime
- disagreeable and degraded
- odious and repulsive
- fascinatingly odd
- thoroughly devilish
- grandiose, monotonous
- fierce and marvelous
- solemn and savage
- ludicrous surreal
- cool unbroken
- triumphant and incomparable
- mangled and rueful
- gaunt and tremendous
- painful and singular
- frightful, heart-rending
- sorrowful and horrible
- miserable and calamitous
- oddest visual
- unending gaudy
- magnificent, breathtaking
- wonderful and most beautiful
- dramatic and somber
- edifying and gratuitous
- present smoky
- gory and most unpleasant
- thoroughly disgusting and humiliating
- wonderfully exhilarating
- mournful and degrading
- pleasant or delightful
- pitiable and degraded
- delightful savage
- splendid but barbarous
- pompous, theatrical
- edifying and impressive
- equal pleasing
- wild and dim
- animated and splendid
- constant and pleasing
- gorgeous sentient
- joyous and comic
- great, dreadful
- impressive and appalling
- beautiful and awe-inspiring
- utterly thrilling
- orgiastic, colorful
- gorgeous and inspiring
- especially pitiful
- pleasant scenic
- forlorn mental
- sublime and awe-inspiring
- grim, awe-inspiring
- truly harrowing
- extremely gory
- indescribably terrific
- grim and dazzling
- superb but dangerous
- magical and wondrous
- multitudinous wide
- tragic enormous
- unified and progressive
- simple ostensible
- intensely overpowering
- fearfully magnificent
- anomalous and disgraceful
- great apocalyptic
- striking sidereal
- awful and ominous
- piteous and hideous
- miserable and piteous
- such gloomier
- magnificent and memorable
- grand and noteworthy
- wonderfully grand but terrible
- particularly sane
- dazzling and inspiring
- dreadfully dramatic
- magnificent and dreadfully dramatic
- animated and singular
- incredible and humiliating
- glorious ornithological
- religious and impressive
- partly horrible
- painful and partly horrible
- horrible and tremendous
- quaint and almost comic
- animated and magnificent
- overwhelmingly grim
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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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