Describing Words

examples: nosewinterblue eyeswoman

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 testing

Below is a list of describing words for testing. 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 testing:

  • full-sized projective
  • cruel quick
  • conclusive diagnostic
  • original operational
  • positive serological
  • perfunctory educational
  • final and most decisive
  • simple but most useful
  • instantaneous and infallible
  • basic free-fall
  • evoked-potential
  • new and most unreasonable
  • simple but sure
  • passably infallible
  • single statistical
  • sharpest attainable
  • gross psychological
  • excellent, instructive
  • sacred final
  • fairest single
  • reliable chemical
  • useful quantitative
  • valuable initial
  • delicate possible
  • comprehensive nuclear
  • same, better
  • dangerous, grueling
  • last and satisfying
  • subtle ideological
  • final, spontaneous
  • interracial or cross-cultural
  • alpha french
  • decisive, undeniable
  • imperfect absolute
  • severe, physical
  • delicate and philosophical
  • highly fallacious
  • common and infallible
  • superficial or profound
  • limited but not unimportant
  • severe but pleasant
  • bare, material
  • highest secondary
  • interior, immediate
  • elemental chemical
  • excellent and exceedingly simple
  • unexpected and offhand
  • rigid but true
  • healthy technical
  • rigid and thoroughgoing
  • voluntary national
  • old utilitarian
  • infallible chinese
  • sloppy nuclear
  • better rough
  • final late-night
  • previously unannounced
  • equal higher
  • proper forty-year
  • simple and foolproof
  • quick, unnoticed
  • unwarrantable and unjust
  • severe final
  • hideous but inevitable
  • loose but capricious
  • valuable precautionary
  • conceptual, historical
  • high, ethereal
  • vulgar, fallacious
  • wholesome utilitarian
  • unfair and prosaic
  • decisive experimental
  • admirably delicate
  • convenient and delicate
  • closest and most severe
  • last severest
  • odious sacramental
  • active and crucial
  • old-fashioned and favorite
  • sure interior
  • complete paper-making
  • clearly applicable
  • true and only proper
  • accurately scientific
  • therefore decisive
  • measurably fair
  • slow and costly chemical
  • bromine-thermal
  • actual and crucial
  • initial and crucial
  • practically unfailing
  • instinctive, childlike
  • fearful and final
  • zeal religious
  • open and tangible
  • further and most delicate
  • crucial preliminary
  • severely arithmetical
  • ancient agonizing
  • exacting and satisfactory

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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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