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 syllables
Below is a list of describing words for syllables. 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 syllables:
- confusing but sonorous
- extraordinary mono
- sweet and contrapuntal
- sufficiently troubling
- many unstressed
- subordinate inflectional
- sibilant and glottal
- drawn-out single
- additional meaningless
- flat final
- suffixal and derivative
- initial short
- suffixal
- weak or grave
- long or emphatic
- apparent single
- ominous, world-shaking
- paltry single
- guttural and hesitant
- extra-metrical
- more unstressed
- extra unstressed
- strident, outlandish
- penultimate, last
- more extra-metrical
- final medial
- musical, high-pitched
- equal and monotonous
- conventional and not significant
- definite tense
- seldom meaningless
- hostile double
- single mystic
- final, high-pitched
- unfamiliar tonal
- single, imperative
- meaningless but perfectly sweet
- flat exasperated
- clean and certain
- single sibilant
- curt certain
- superfluous eleventh
- indistinct and incoherent
- originally open
- low and hasty
- single or final
- frequently fewer
- final unstressed
- shortest and feeblest
- last succinct
- resonant celtic
- vacant, fatuous
- obviously redundant
- useless and unwarranted
- piquant curious
- false extra
- famous and striking
- mystically ineffable
- harmonious and sonorous
- entire unstressed
- back awkward
- _hypermetrical
- inarticulate and bestial
- single, grim
- short mellow
- inflectional or subordinate
- legible and audible
- _non_-radical
- distinct and oft-repeated
- vague, baffling
- open two-letter
- next ultimate
- weak or slack
- sacred triliteral
- purely constructional
- short or doubtful
- unknown and high-sounding
- last unsaid
- acute, articulate
- unstressed fifth
- useless short
- overlong final
- final, unstressed
- portentously distinct and clear
- extra final
- portentously distinct
- genuinely hypermetrical
- long penultimate
- tough and leaden
- radical and inflectional
- discerning sporadic
- important significant
- diminutive and potential
- full and resounding
- fifth, eighth and eleventh
- fourth, eighth and tenth
- sibilant french
- massive majestic
- orthodox musical
- quantitatively long
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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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