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 success
Below is a list of describing words for success. 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 success:
- smooth, social
- early spectacular
- later phenomenal
- tremendous dramatic
- occasional, verifiable
- social, personal and sexual
- additional and magnificent
- subsequent civilian
- comparable domestic
- equal ill
- pacific clerical
- bright and satisfying
- ultimate triumphant
- vain--general
- immediate and brilliant
- commercial and critical
- little predictive
- sole signal
- sporadic but inconclusive
- unexpected or well-deserved
- partial and apparent
- commercial or critical
- quiet but striking
- much notable
- immediate, enormous
- smallest routine
- new surefire
- back-turning-only complete
- brilliant and entire
- undeserved or accidental
- unfailingly scented
- brilliant and almost uninterrupted
- brilliant and immediate
- evident and eminent
- remarkable ministerial
- absolute and conspicuous
- unique, exceptional
- greatest and most surprising
- signal ill
- great and undisputed
- fullest and most inconceivable
- whole, remarkable
- similar glorious
- petty and inevitable
- durable popular
- balanced personal
- temporary or fictitious
- conspicuous and unqualified
- big or showy
- sudden and sometimes startling
- ever bad
- simple, significant
- delightfully imperfect
- chancy, intoxicating
- dazzling, legendary
- great self-interested
- invariable popular
- hard-won and mediocre
- messy partial
- apparent and partial
- _un_usual
- inordinate popular
- however partial
- happy and sure
- glorious and well-deserved
- glorious and abiding
- total and resounding
- overjoyed historic
- gratifying and truly praiseworthy
- striking and unbroken
- complete and conspicuous
- flagrant, undisturbed
- prosperous and uninterrupted
- next and crowning
- splendid and immediate
- zeal and invariable
- doubtful and partial
- swift and invariable
- instantaneous and extraordinary
- unbroken and unstained
- goal social
- prodigious and perfectly unprecedented
- spectacular and extensive
- doubtful, promising
- comparative, present
- astonishing and decisive
- ultimate brilliant
- glorious and gratifying
- visible and comparatively immediate
- brilliant and unanimous
- honest theatrical
- perfect and extraordinary
- exceptional and solitary
- enormous missionary
- game--partial and temporary
- game--partial
- artistic and popular
- fresh, welcome
- physical or commercial
- signal artistic
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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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