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 style
Below is a list of describing words for style. 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 style:
- satisfactorily high-rolling
- severe minimalist
- old inflated
- candid and familiar
- graceful and piquant
- elliptical conversational
- flat but colorful
- gracious and antique
- african aristocratic
- curious jewelled
- well-known, fresh and easy
- new, loose
- alone dissident
- antique byzantine
- usual tasteless
- well-known charming
- peculiar fluent
- good ambassadorial
- crisp managerial
- disturbingly military
- utilitarian architectural
- solemn or poetical
- quaint, metaphorical
- slick and mystic
- somewhat funnier
- peculiarly ecclesiastical
- direct, graphic
- artistic and humane
- raw, unpolished
- customary antique
- pure rhetorical
- neat but childish
- semi-atheistical demoniac
- terse conversational
- comfortable and unadorned
- uncompromisingly comfortable and unadorned
- uncompromisingly comfortable
- brisk and prosaic
- sometimes slipshod
- commonplacely artificial
- jaunty and commonplacely artificial
- bald and journalistic
- somewhat bald and journalistic
- distractingly modern
- silent barefooted
- chatty, endearing
- singularly pure and pleasing
- archaic byzantine
- simple, vivacious
- bold but astute
- artificial continental
- lordly cognizant
- simple and picturesque
- graceful australian
- oblique, elliptical
- evasive, secretive
- lavish, elegant
- free, indirect
- peculiar and rather fantastic
- grand and flamboyant
- high intricate
- best savage
- snazzy substantial
- strict somber
- earthy, compelling
- legendarily informal
- strict oriental
- domestic, conciliatory
- robust, powerful and vigorous
- vigorous and resonant
- sober classical
- singularly terse
- happiest and most spirited
- fervently pious
- majestic and appropriate
- loosely discursive
- stout persistent
- slender persistent
- simple armorial
- classical victorian
- old-fashioned mortal
- vaguely western
- naturalistic, realistic
- almost civilian
- oddly precise and polite
- simple but not squalid
- radiantly explanatory
- straight and civil
- slight, persuasive
- shy and ponderous
- gross and stringent
- concise grand
- daringly avant-garde
- quaint declamatory
- new-feudal
- majestic, unaffected
- sometimes informal
- intimate and sometimes informal
- old-fashioned journalistic
- smooth, sympathetic
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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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