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 terminology
Below is a list of describing words for terminology. 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 terminology:
- gaelic online
- aeronavigational
- nautical and aeronavigational
- barbarous and perplexing
- appropriate psychiatric
- superlogical
- accurate descriptive
- precise and well-defined
- darwinian and spencerian
- formal botanical
- traditional nautical
- geographical and agricultural
- utilitarian and unclassical
- obsolete scholastic
- obscure philosophic
- obscure, philosophic
- clear and perfectly flexible
- pompous and superfluous
- copious and malleable
- equally dry and stubborn
- literal, scientific
- again tribal and national
- again tribal
- every-day technical
- precise and rational
- current anatomical
- speciously scientific
- exactly terrifying
- antique theological
- ambiguous chinese
- newtonian and darwinian
- chinese technical
- latest exotic
- peculiar technical
- usual biochemical
- pseudo-nautical
- standard, acceptable
- biological or mechanical
- now biological or mechanical
- terribly materialistic
- generally simple and self-explanatory
- militarily acceptable
- unseemly bourgeois
- sophisticated, clinical
- phonological and anatomical
- dependably cute and inaccurate
- dependably cute
- popular feminine
- historical or biblical
- scientific legal
- strangely unsatisfactory
- dry and stubborn
- pompous scientific
- clumsy descriptive
- minimum essential
- infinite legal
- innocent technical
- abstract and pedantic
- exact and diversified
- pompous philosophic
- rational zoological
- modern metaphysical
- technical and scholastic
- correct medical
- plain descriptive
- common philosophic
- vast and ingenious
- useless and misleading
- =additional
- health-related
- unusual and obscure
- phony nautical
- copious medical
- adequate descriptive
- much buddhist
- clear statutory
- new systematic
- perfectly flexible
- solemn scientific
- �nautical
- now biological
- extensive technological
- polite and noncommittal
- currently correct
- vigorous and expressive
- merely geographical
- current philosophical
- ordinary aesthetic
- unintelligible technical
- less misleading
- modern technical
- new and scientific
- acceptable scientific
- incomprehensible medical
- acute logical
- present exact
- excellent and appropriate
- exact and scientific
- complex scientific
- other navigational
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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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