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 story
Below is a list of describing words for story. 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 story:
- clever, realistic
- singularly powerful and beautiful
- unexciting and uninteresting
- bright, refreshing
- dark and scandalous
- red true
- tediously heart-warming
- gaudy and wonderful
- riotously funny
- bright, healthful
- wholesome fairy
- exceedingly poignant and effective
- poignant and effective
- exceedingly poignant
- graphic and resounding
- thrilling and eventful
- otherwise bright and sunny
- vigorous western
- trumped-up spanish
- mysterious and improbable
- somewhat degenerative
- sordid, crummy
- brilliant and engrossing
- contemporary short
- current and probable
- vivid, enthralling
- exciting, fast-moving
- real real-estate
- comic short
- disturbing trivial
- rather sad and unpleasant
- ingenious and absorbingly interesting
- strong, masculine and persuasive
- horrible and authentic
- old-fashioned, amphibious
- interesting, dramatic
- fine and continuous
- admirably swift and smooth
- long and most perplexed
- sad victorious
- dramatic short
- major untold
- crazy fantastic
- nice, sad
- seamless and obsessive
- modest two-and-a-half
- harrowing short
- incredible and yet veracious
- decidedly powerful
- fearful commonplace
- beloved, sad
- bly exciting
- banal long
- banal short
- splendid and frantic
- clumsy and obviously false
- reasonably consecutive and complete
- old and not unfamiliar
- wondrous traditional
- poor-mouth
- terrific, memorable
- net short
- whole circumstantial
- strange profane
- possibly untrue
- most untrue
- remarkably real and fascinating
- remarkably real
- sixth sicilian
- mightily curious and instructive
- mightily curious
- exquisitely cruel
- second lunatic
- artless, sad
- human, pitiful
- classic short
- deceptively commonplace
- whole, sordid
- great front-page
- simplest or silliest
- prize-winning short
- v-shaped single
- scandalous and tragic
- vivid and noteworthy
- old and incoherent
- glad, long
- curiously direct and circumstantial
- brilliant serial
- unknown mythological
- lifelike little
- sparkling, satisfying
- wonderful and preposterous
- agreeable and well-written
- pitiful and unconvincing
- strikingly original and powerful
- forever enchanting
- clean, clear and clever
- incomprehensible serial
- decorous but pungent
- effective short
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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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