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 step

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

  • crucial next
  • quick, buoyant
  • possibly irrevocable
  • logical next
  • single false
  • unquiet and tremulous
  • quick elastic
  • similar and still greater
  • next logical
  • quick, elastic
  • obvious next
  • furtively criminal
  • careful, hushed
  • modern evasive
  • far lighter and livelier
  • slow and proud
  • staggering downward
  • invasive and offensive
  • outrageously radical
  • next staggering
  • fascinating next
  • pleasant, stealthy
  • single extradimensional
  • unsteady and almost tottering
  • proper next
  • slow and infinitely careful
  • silent, vigorous
  • next and great
  • last irreversible
  • splendid portal
  • peculiar transitional
  • delicate and trackless
  • rapid but unsteady
  • alert and impatient
  • dirty top
  • simpler and wiser
  • natural next
  • dreadful and demeaning
  • difficult aristocratic
  • extra and involuntary
  • quite noiseless
  • careful soft
  • heavy important
  • non-existent top
  • next, formalized
  • subsequent and remedial
  • signally fortunate
  • noiseless, cat-like
  • decorously self-effacing
  • irretrievably false
  • distasteful but most necessary
  • slow but not heavy
  • quick and rhythmical
  • definite, irreparable
  • sole bad
  • pragmatic and essential
  • necessary and merciful
  • single cautious
  • heavy, undecided
  • effortless bureaucratic
  • steadier and firmer
  • vigorous, bold
  • critical illicit
  • final off-balance
  • wrong or careless
  • next tentative
  • single instinctive
  • remorseless and inevitable
  • steep, heavy
  • next purposive
  • next cautious
  • powerful confident
  • decisive and irrevocable
  • weak, deliberate
  • wicked and injurious
  • stupid and even reprehensible
  • next wicked
  • heavy and haughty
  • next and most natural
  • indolent purposeful
  • irremediable matrimonial
  • nervous, elastic
  • tremendously papal
  • quick, enterprising
  • deal livelier
  • feeble, noiseless
  • natural and elastic
  • merely sceptical or negative
  • sure, resolute
  • easiest constitutional
  • final and perilous
  • cautiously noiseless
  • equally noiseless
  • heavy, hasty
  • listless and unsettled
  • majestic and elastic
  • timid and unsteady
  • easy but fatal
  • speedy and active
  • unwise and wrongful

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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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