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 subjects
Below is a list of describing words for subjects. 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 subjects:
- coarse, unpromising
- aquatic microscopic
- improper and too serious
- oldest funny
- good hypnotic
- excellent hypnotic
- less recurrent
- unsuspecting, long-suffering
- always interesting and picturesque
- totally non-controversial
- unwilling or unknowing
- lowly rebellious
- poor hypnotic
- vital and grandiose
- new tax-paying
- common and trite
- suitably unconditioned
- normal scholastic
- youthful and naturally vivacious
- irresponsible organic
- docile and amorous
- loyal but most turbulent
- gay or humorous
- old and disturbing
- voluntary and affectionate
- hard and nice
- curious and abstruse
- introductory or grammatical
- remote and abstruse
- sensitive and loyal
- ancient and irritating
- native turkish
- european british
- strange and grave
- preferred trifling
- excessively successful
- _several singular
- safe conversational
- fewer proper
- suitable rival
- complex and most difficult
- introductory and grammatical
- lowest and most inferior
- coloured british
- difficult and impersonal
- deeply uninteresting
- docile and willing
- now happy and loyal
- familiar and legendary
- favorite scholastic
- nervous, bilious
- best neurotic
- interesting or cheerful
- civilized and obedient
- sublime philosophical
- immediate and hereditary
- fresh, neutral
- ancient and most faithful
- excruciatingly private
- thither dutiful and faithful
- equally solemn and momentous
- thither dutiful
- highly ticklish
- ancient loving
- unworthy or inappropriate
- comic and political
- poetical and prosaical
- chiefly scriptural
- vexatious personal
- mostly revolutionary
- exquisite and baffling
- far nearer and dearer
- apparently uninviting
- meanest british
- vague and frivolous
- meek imperial
- far older and worse
- reflexively taboo
- medical and near-medical
- frequently ribald
- near-medical
- loyal or loving
- rictly physiological
- loyal and beloved
- outwardly deformed
- entirely new and unfamiliar
- giddy, interesting
- increasingly irritating
- everlastingly amusing
- famous true
- strict academic
- educational short
- palpable and enthusiastic
- ungracious and revolting
- harsh and distasteful
- coarse and impracticable
- dutiful and loyal
- gomigal
- morally unimpeachable
- humblest british
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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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