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 subject
Below is a list of describing words for subject. 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 subject:
- coarse, unpromising
- oldest funny
- good hypnotic
- excellent hypnotic
- less recurrent
- unsuspecting, long-suffering
- totally non-controversial
- lowly rebellious
- poor hypnotic
- suitably unconditioned
- youthful and naturally vivacious
- docile and amorous
- old and disturbing
- hard and nice
- introductory or grammatical
- strange and grave
- excessively successful
- safe conversational
- suitable rival
- complex and most difficult
- introductory and grammatical
- lowest and most inferior
- difficult and impersonal
- docile and willing
- familiar and legendary
- nervous, bilious
- interesting or cheerful
- sublime philosophical
- fresh, neutral
- excruciatingly private
- equally solemn and momentous
- highly ticklish
- unworthy or inappropriate
- poetical and prosaical
- vexatious personal
- exquisite and baffling
- apparently uninviting
- meanest british
- meek imperial
- reflexively taboo
- frequently ribald
- loyal or loving
- loyal and beloved
- entirely new and unfamiliar
- increasingly irritating
- famous true
- educational short
- ungracious and revolting
- coarse and impracticable
- gomigal
- humblest british
- singular annual
- interesting and fearful
- recent, sad
- worn-out hackneyed
- faithful or obedient
- big, debatable
- tiresome and incomprehensible
- ephemeral or transitory
- futile and inhuman
- utterly futile and inhuman
- equally obedient
- polish historical
- useful or formidable
- large devotional
- perplexing and interesting
- particularly obdurate
- dispersal and individual
- difficult and all-important
- entirely new and exciting
- loyal new
- difficult, technical
- hopelessly abstract
- possibly contentious
- large and possibly contentious
- startling and very mysterious
- pointless, trite
- interesting and domestic
- old and ever more
- loyal and not useless
- truly total and absolute
- truly total
- highly recalcitrant
- pure, timeless
- unsuitable and ineffective
- real or logical
- obedient and most dutiful
- tolerably thirsty
- great and provocative
- specious or pleasing
- confessedly complex
- vast and highly important
- impersonal and easy
- richest and most dangerous
- healthy and less
- sentient and conscious
- athletic and arrogant
- faithful or loving
- therefore important and allowable
- richest and most transcendent
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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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