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 surroundings
Below is a list of describing words for surroundings. 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 surroundings:
- barren and unpromising
- blank and geometrical
- serene, moonlit
- humble and sordid
- dull explanatory
- comfortable but boring
- rural, primitive
- indescribably muddy
- coarse, unkempt
- gloomy and unaccustomed
- animated or irritating
- intensely gothic
- dead and dismal
- dull and peaceful
- wonderful and elegant
- unfortunate material
- decreasingly realistic
- peculiar and unhealthy
- extremely uptight
- approximate planetary
- seemingly unfamiliar
- strange and utterly new
- particularly unconventional
- fairly upscale
- surprisingly congenial
- suddenly luxurious
- almost zero-gravity
- old and rather staid
- truly freakish
- eerie and dangerous
- dull, material
- impossible and absolutely repulsive
- unhealthy, unjust
- natural wooded
- somewhat unjudicial
- remarkably pleasing and attractive
- equally picturesque and romantic
- inexpensive or thrifty
- top and unsophisticated
- harsh and uncongenial
- richer external
- sumptuous natural
- sordid and gloomy
- bad hygienic
- bleak and indescribably bitter
- tense, claustrophobic
- revolting poverty-stricken
- boring, rural
- pleasant illusory
- peaceful, sorrowful
- comfortable claustrophobic
- familiar, habitual
- informal and quiet
- immodest feminine
- happy, unaccustomed
- congenial moral
- hostile and bare
- affectionate and respectable
- squalid and wicked
- local aqueous
- wholly javanese
- hideous and garish
- disquieting and fantastic
- narrow and dull
- plain syrian
- grimy, coarse
- unkempt and uncouth
- inappropriate, every-day
- comfortable and healthful
- strange, stark
- strange impersonal
- familiar official
- mid strange
- more bohemian
- new luxurious
- generally pestilent
- cozy familiar
- necessarily bleak
- stark and artificial
- unexpectedly cosmopolitan
- insufferable mental
- nebulous, gray
- present vile
- admittedly comfortable
- clean and antiseptic
- absolutely repulsive
- queer northern
- sparse, neat
- intrinsically unchanged
- freer and healthier
- promising and resourceful
- cold, magnificent
- cool and pleasantly austere
- early fastidious and intellectual
- early fastidious
- incurably modern
- tranquil and salubrious
- infernal and infamous
- equally sepulchral
- leafy and congenial
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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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