Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 summary

Below is a list of describing words for summary. 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 summary:

  • rapid and stinging
  • complete journalistic
  • shortest philosophic
  • shortest ethical
  • manual and brief
  • rigidly judicial
  • bald and ineffective
  • slight and popular
  • philosophical brief
  • brief but inaccurate
  • rapid bare
  • capable historical
  • involuntary latent
  • intelligent and striking
  • sketchy and vivacious
  • entirely grave
  • long and forceful
  • comprehensive and concise
  • semantically correct
  • simple one-word
  • bland, quick
  • good generalized
  • admirably succinct and accurate
  • concise and unhappy
  • full but concise
  • faithful and brief
  • professedly inadequate
  • complete and gay
  • impartial and impressive
  • brief but judicious
  • impartial and notable
  • simple inferential
  • brief and somewhat imperfect
  • beautiful but incomplete
  • entirely unexciting
  • rapid and entirely unexciting
  • tribes--general
  • machine--general
  • typical or pictorial
  • brief and insulting
  • definite, clear
  • concise, rapid
  • rapid boyish
  • fortunes--general
  • immense fortunes--general
  • poetical, political
  • compact and almost perfect
  • unusually rhetorical
  • statistical religious
  • concise, impartial and careful
  • brief and fair
  • exhaustive and capable
  • skillfully condensed
  • clear and invaluable
  • highly pregnant and short
  • pregnant and short
  • highly pregnant
  • shocking and still more
  • rapid but exhaustive
  • severe but perfectly correct
  • brief but rather full
  • remarkably able and judicial
  • comprehensive and agreeable
  • trustworthy and attractive
  • succinct and authentic
  • present inconclusive
  • voluble and accurate
  • rather brief and inadequate
  • invaluable analytical
  • brief and careful
  • modest biographical
  • excellent and critical
  • offensive, more
  • bald and concise
  • bald and fragmentary
  • linguistic and aesthetic
  • proper antithetical
  • comprehensive and compact
  • full and well-illustrated
  • entirely unoriginal
  • little contradictory
  • short but perfect
  • fair and judicious
  • superbly concise
  • superbly concise and effective
  • concise and rapid
  • fairly concise
  • brief but highly complimentary
  • crumpled overall
  • balanced biographical
  • brief and urgent
  • immediate corrective
  • special six-month
  • brief one-page
  • five-minute factual
  • succinct, well-organized
  • nice and very accurate
  • succinct and accurate
  • balanced and fair
  • shortest complete

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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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