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 telephone
Below is a list of describing words for telephone. 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 telephone:
- public and special-purpose
- nationwide cellular
- automatic domestic
- terminal, digital
- good mobile
- local cellular
- many unsatisfied
- worldwide external
- direct dial
- sufficient automatic
- oddly ambulatory
- wireless, wireless
- good automatic
- modern internal
- several cellular
- mobile cellular
- antique, two-part
- bedraggled mobile
- moldy portable
- nationwide universal
- cellular mobile
- fiber-optic transatlantic
- tone-dial
- automatic digital
- gray handheld
- nearest long-distance
- wide automatic
- black dial
- ultramodern portable
- primitive, nontechnological
- underwater wireless
- last obscene
- unsafe overseas
- abortive, expensive
- whole long-distance
- extremely high-tech
- red portable
- mobile and portable
- white, push-button
- poor domestic
- transcontinental wireless
- strange, wireless
- spiritual long-distance
- large cellular
- crude little
- lonely idle
- more effortless
- thrice fatal
- local basic
- three-hour-long
- numerous wireless
- good domestic
- modern automatic
- fully automatic
- domestic and international
- nearby outdoor
- antique dial
- cordless portable
- dense, overhead
- cheap, bad
- durable, new
- mysterious coincidental
- ubiquitous long-distance
- piritual
- scary, one-sided
- vital but erratic
- algerian terrorist
- white rotary-dial
- few transatlantic
- sleek swedish
- black, rotary
- open transatlantic
- several transatlantic
- business-like feminine
- down anonymous
- \~international
- perhaps local
- mother-of-pearl french
- prepaid cellular
- awkwardly formal
- several outdated
- insistent, nerve-racking
- least adequate
- oddly menacing
- natural central
- glaringly modern
- up-to-date wireless
- practical, inexpensive
- transcontinental and transatlantic
- marvelous wireless
- terse long-distance
- rude but real
- old-fashioned party-line
- one-sided and enigmatic
- unexpectedly responsive
- international and oriental
- international automatic
- frequent long-distance
- ornate antique
- small, inadequate
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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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