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 steps
Below is a list of describing words for steps. 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 steps:
- crucial next
- few downward
- few unsteady
- quick, buoyant
- possibly irrevocable
- age-old concrete
- lower and slippery
- logical next
- single false
- broad, colored
- unquiet and tremulous
- aimless, exasperated
- quick elastic
- similar and still greater
- next logical
- few tottering
- small, certain
- regular, jerky
- purposely heavy
- careful, feeble
- such ophthalmic
- probable evolutionary
- momentous, decisive
- upright regular
- few staggering
- quick, elastic
- obvious next
- public and renowned
- furtively criminal
- necessary, bloody
- careful, hushed
- slow repentant
- modern evasive
- crisp resounding
- far lighter and livelier
- heavy and uneven
- slow and proud
- thereafter immediate
- anxious and reluctant
- prudent, stealthy
- staggering downward
- tiny slow
- invasive and offensive
- dim concrete
- outrageously radical
- smooth, unremarkable
- next staggering
- servile and arbitrary
- fascinating next
- grotesque and lumbering
- pleasant, stealthy
- swift, equal
- single extradimensional
- shallow padded
- unsteady and almost tottering
- quick crisp
- proper next
- weak but rapid
- slow and infinitely careful
- subsequently influential
- silent, vigorous
- important and subsequently influential
- next and great
- fascinating, languid
- last irreversible
- cardinal, other
- splendid portal
- careful and almost solemn
- peculiar transitional
- short, tottering
- delicate and trackless
- discreet short
- rapid but unsteady
- unequal and disordered
- alert and impatient
- equal, annual
- dirty top
- simpler and wiser
- slower, shorter
- small numerous
- short and slow
- few hesitant
- natural next
- cautious, smaller
- dreadful and demeaning
- precise procedural
- difficult aristocratic
- weary, elephantine
- extra and involuntary
- trustworthy logical
- quite noiseless
- impeccably logical
- careful soft
- doubtful and timorous
- heavy important
- quick anguished
- non-existent top
- wary, unhurried
- next, formalized
- timorous and sure
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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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