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 symbols
Below is a list of describing words for symbols. 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 symbols:
- }arial alternative
- lucidly coloured
- potent and romantic
- optional astrological
- undeniably potent and romantic
- partial, fragmentary
- undeniably potent
- arial alternative
- alternate semantic
- ultimately female
- weird heraldic
- accidental and individual
- monoideal
- triliteral monoideal
- subtle ancient
- longer stationary
- biological and mathematical
- small but exact
- sacred or monstrous
- gaunt and distinctive
- numerous mystic
- visible and ultimate
- actually ancient
- ingeniously appropriate
- familiar atomic
- incomprehensible blue-green
- vocal or visual
- mathematical and arbitrary
- oriental mystic
- effective but surprising
- decorative, formalized
- barredspiral
- rude forceful
- psychological transcendent
- special phonemic
- hideous cryptic
- extra and identical
- asymmetrical yellow
- rich biblical
- final astrological
- exactly religious
- placid and pathetic
- printed or graven
- abstract olfactory
- diactritical
- soundly uninteresting
- fly nobler
- austere, aloof
- powerful archetypal
- evil taboo
- healthy and humane
- standard hexagonal
- intricate black-and-white
- tangible, understandable
- delicate arcane
- trivial, more
- apparently semantic
- icy algebraic
- same unnameable
- unnecessarily coy
- deeply strange
- non-existant, figurative
- yellow magical
- other right-hand
- limited, three-dimensional
- vigorous and undeniable
- greatest tangible
- scandalous and intimate
- random and contradictory
- rich but controversial
- aggressive ecclesiastical
- little and apparently insignificant
- voluntary linguistic
- sensible material
- thoroughly abstract
- anye idle
- thoroughly abstract and artificial
- female prostrate
- true or mnemonic
- universally widespread
- oldest and most indubitable
- divine and efficacious
- babylonian mystic
- approximate best
- so-called solar
- ancient and seemingly universal
- glyphical
- unmistakable male
- spatial and personal
- innocent and potent
- undoubtedly male
- sacred and formal
- undoubtedly female
- final and most sacred
- puzzling but undoubtedly female
- prominent pagan
- menacing and funereal
- exquisite or significant
- uncouth and inadequate
- rudder--special
Popular Searches
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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