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 suggestions
Below is a list of describing words for suggestions. 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 suggestions:
- fresh and useful
- dishonorable and sinful
- further brilliant
- giddy loose
- palpably judicious
- gloomy, downbeat
- shrewd and useful
- fleeting and subtle
- pertinent and useful
- oldest and most practical
- dangerous and uncanny
- farfetched, dim
- agreeable alien
- pictorial and mathematical
- timid and ill-timed
- loosely philosophic
- next, definite
- deep and esoteric
- darkly wild
- little but sinister
- rhetorical and most ungracious
- unthinkably maddening
- last and quite unofficial
- haunting shadowy
- infinite, eloquent
- vague and inexplicit
- profound or acute
- merest, tiniest
- mute and horrible
- hypnotic and psychoanalytic
- shouting-genial or sarcastic
- shouting-genial
- bizarre and rather ornate
- blended vague
- logical, common-sense
- more-or-less serious
- unavoidably practical
- vague and shocking
- odd, premature
- broad or amiable
- apparently ill-advised
- deep and genial
- surprisingly welcome
- triple matrimonial
- often furtive
- slight and often furtive
- obscene and increasingly attractive
- diplomatically gentle
- slyly obscene
- inventive and vicious
- shouting�genial
- particularly inventive and vicious
- shouting�genial or sarcastic
- faintest, merest
- vague, irritating
- distinctly ecclesiastical
- subtle hypnotic
- refined, aboriginal
- ingly fantastical
- general classic
- intelligent and workable
- tempting baptismal
- weighty and promising
- ideal allegorical
- recent strategic
- eminently plain and practical
- faintest but constant
- eminently plain
- elusive snowy
- hasty and dreadful
- small contradictory
- subconscious and shadowy
- excellent and reasonable
- pleasantly morbid
- evasive and cheerful
- neat and unambiguous
- vile and cold-blooded
- ingenuously disingenuous
- dark and capricious
- fully acceptable
- innocent artful
- reasonable short-term
- few irresistible
- improbably philosophical
- anatomically doubtful
- delicately false
- interesting and mutually exclusive
- curiously erudite
- disturbing insatiable
- strangest paradoxical
- fanciful philosophical
- magnificently luminous
- occasional unwise
- longer poetic or picturesque
- usual contradictory
- fundamental and perpetual
- dimly awful
- seeming evident
- wild or murderous
- brilliant and helpful
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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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