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 substitute
Below is a list of describing words for substitute. 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 substitute:
- perfectly safe and pleasant
- rude but certain
- mighty bloodless
- frigid tangled
- cheap, shadowy
- harmless but inadequate
- cheap, all-powerful
- grim mechanical
- massive cultured
- vague but plausible
- modern condensed
- chemically similar
- rather tawdry and shoddy
- inexact, mechanical
- other anemic
- agreeable but not satisfactory
- wide-awake and infallible
- singular and somewhat inconvenient
- vulgar and unsatisfactory
- rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory
- effective indirect
- bold but substantial
- unduly charming
- unduly charming and attractive
- younger and livelier
- poor but essential
- lazy, flimsy
- rather literal-minded
- cheaper, better
- delicate and tempting
- convenient and up-to-date
- morbid and self-deceiving
- wilted and brown
- preferable and most effective
- modern and often inferior
- efficient and very cheap
- auxiliary and partial
- bright and dependable
- comfortable or attractive
- unfortunate and most unworthy
- human selective
- so-called inexpensive
- non-violent but coercive
- cheap and perfect
- youthfully unexpected
- gorgeous and durable
- permanent or comparatively permanent
- imperfectly specious
- well-bred, fiery
- cheap and appropriate
- bogus alcoholic
- british and patriotic
- convenient but unreliable
- harmless available
- entire satisfactory
- cheap philanthropic
- inferior but belligerently present
- belligerently present
- substitute--partial
- hopelessly incompetent and stupid
- perfectly harmless and innocuous
- chaste and temporary
- satisfactory and fairly elastic
- humble but fairly efficient
- available empirical
- eager and equally credulous
- poor and most unsatisfactory
- proper and almost exclusive
- liberal & conciliatory
- speedily obtainable
- fragrant and healthful
- plain and cosmopolitan
- meaningless and needless
- sufficient and sensible
- impersonal, efficient
- recent and very clumsy
- sorry red-brick
- young and weak-kneed
- terribly inferior
- artful subjective
- pretentious wholesale
- ornate and convenient
- endurable temporary
- fairly efficacious
- effective and cheap
- best penal
- particular penal
- genuine penal
- tawdry and shoddy
- frequent and satisfactory
- harmless and agreeable
- graceful and wholesome
- effective and attractive
- healthy, virile
- common cost-conscious
- practi\-cal artificial
- ly acceptable
- disappointing and depressing
- inefficient and time-consuming
- helpless french
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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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