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 symbolism
Below is a list of describing words for symbolism. 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 symbolism:
- building--ecclesiastical
- vague psychological
- certain wasteful
- mystic and repulsive
- rich astronomical
- incredibly complex and subtle
- profound subconscious
- worse, sentimental
- peculiar and obscene
- tribal or religious
- predominantly chemical
- functional or only material
- intimate primitive
- other, scientific
- much graceful and significant
- subtle and piquant
- fancy, rough
- obvious medical
- vast pictorial
- universally peaceful
- conceivable finite
- unique, vital
- active and reprehensible
- curious and impulsive
- important erotic
- whole, erotic
- sad and rather gloomy
- pure, sexual
- commonest sexual
- far-fetched, enigmatical
- reticent and effective
- pictorial religious
- graceful dreamy
- pompous and pagan
- religious and esoteric
- unfettered fancy
- impossible, bold
- indifferently appropriate
- continuous indefinable
- quaint and elusive
- ironic smug
- primitive or alien
- heraldic and ecclesiastical
- unaffected but fine
- perfect imaginable
- silent and malignant
- much grotesque
- newer religious
- actually functional
- material and functional
- esthetic and scientific
- scientific and mystical
- gruesomely overwrought
- illusory, mere
- common alchemical
- whole geometrical
- stark, solemn
- apt, facile
- meaningful and magnificent
- much freudian
- abstract freudian
- fantastic and esoteric
- unconscious linguistic
- truly linguistic
- appealing and eloquent
- similar erotic
- coarse or awkward
- precise and explicit
- just modern
- exquisite tragic
- sad gloomy
- weird and monstrous
- pagan and modern
- graceful and significant
- medi�val and historical
- mediaeval and historical
- fruitless and empty
- coarse but expressive
- recondite and narrow
- perhaps profound
- freudian ready-made
- curious and secret
- certain seeming
- mystical or religious
- deep and glorious
- appropriate mathematical
- much unobtrusive
- cold and commonplace
- ecclesiastical and architectural
- rich and poetic
- usually quaint
- ready and common
- _monumental
- direct pictorial
- subtle erotic
- archaic and awkward
- often archaic
- much fascinating
- religious and mythical
- profound and reverential
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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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