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 tactic
Below is a list of describing words for tactic. 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 tactic:
- merely unsure
- unorthodox but workable
- outlandishly successful
- unethical but effective
- dirty, demeaning
- childish but fruitless
- stale and old-fashioned
- valid psychological
- wildly unorthodox
- wise survival
- comically effective
- reprehensible, furtive
- extreme but effective
- cheap rhetorical
- smart, merciless
- absurd but natural
- second sceptical
- corporate anti-takeover
- marginally acceptable
- new fanatical
- particularly innovative
- principal survival
- common fundamentalist
- primary budgetary
- standard teen
- strange survival
- now favorite
- good diversionary
- cheap sentimental
- favorite initial
- cruel professorial
- clumsy diversionary
- old timeworn
- best conciliatory
- centuries-old military
- bad, sloppy
- now time-honored
- dangerous diversionary
- cheap and anonymous
- long-established survival
- deliberately divisive
- slyly rude
- strange defensive
- surprisingly dirty
- psychologically valid
- age-old and generally effective
- latest diversionary
- supremely risky
- devious but legitimate
- male survival
- lame strategic
- distinctly naval
- possible parliamentary
- last rhetorical
- classic terrorist
- standard evasive
- anti-takeover
- grand parliamentary
- same worn-out
- diversionary
- normal evasive
- practical and diplomatic
- strange, effective
- other workable
- possible diversionary
- apparently feasible
- simple diversionary
- classic diversionary
- best survival
- devastating new
- little diversionary
- larger liberal
- harsh but effective
- legitimate or illegitimate
- baffling new
- new and subtler
- new and unorthodox
- classic military
- certain and safe
- new defensive
- common jewish
- same pathetic
- obvious and open
- ridiculous, pathetic
- same horrific
- more cost-effective
- new and innovative
- less adroit
- rather disgusting
- sole rational
- simple defensive
- perhaps extreme
- generally effective
- island-hopping
- extremely bizarre
- seemingly suicidal
- best soviet
- unsure
- same rhetorical
- cost-effective
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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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