Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 staff

Below is a list of describing words for staff. 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 staff:

  • naval general
  • belgian general
  • german general
  • early-morning senior
  • tame medical
  • austro-hungarian general
  • boring general
  • percival oaken
  • grateful hospital
  • reliable and polite
  • pasthoral
  • interesting and miscellaneous
  • rumanian general
  • adjutant-general and other
  • small meteorological
  • utterly necessary
  • minimal clerical
  • various unfocused
  • well-trained and unobtrusive
  • mostly non-oriental
  • top organizational
  • finest cardiological
  • subsidized personal
  • full culinary
  • regular pictorial
  • blue crystal
  • large secretarial
  • inquisitive, intrusive
  • educational and domestic
  • nighttime custodial
  • tough knotted
  • always subservient
  • alert and abundant
  • drunken medical
  • general non-commissioned
  • well-organized general
  • well-organized secretarial
  • equally specialized
  • ornamental general
  • already sufficient and complete
  • cash-laden
  • anti-national military
  • numerous and highly gifted
  • french headquarter
  • magically invisible
  • military general
  • eager permanent
  • quirky scientific
  • mute alien
  • remote diplomatic
  • ancestral, imperishable
  • skilled silent
  • so-called indispensable
  • sharp reportorial
  • top-level technical
  • entire first-floor
  • privileged general
  • basic permanent
  • same ill-defined
  • many eighteen-year-old
  • extremely uncooperative
  • capable and copious
  • imperial headquarter
  • senior fairy
  • enamelled pastoral
  • incurably refractory
  • administrative and auxiliary
  • short ashen
  • crooked pastoral
  • whole journal
  • eminently moderate
  • chief and genial
  • imperial general
  • soviet general
  • bland but comfortable
  • own emergent
  • entire editorial
  • imperial chemical
  • japanese general
  • entire robotic
  • permanent, live-in
  • eccentric creative
  • same psychiatric
  • clerical and technical
  • quiet and serial
  • hospital professional
  • medical and logistical
  • sizeable domestic
  • clerical official
  • formerly magical
  • short, contorted
  • red general
  • regimental logistical
  • heavy, gnarled
  • local janitorial
  • shortly numerous
  • beat-up but very obsequious
  • impatient and other
  • lower-level diplomatic
  • new supervisory

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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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