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 text
Below is a list of describing words for text. 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 text:
- >verbal
- divine explicit
- enough bilingual
- small capital
- sloppy fragile
- entire authentic
- literal spanish
- pure and exact
- new & additional
- true and tremendous
- late explanatory
- readable plain
- least hierarchical
- pliant and fertile
- parallel dutch
- scientific and very practical
- original printed
- intentionally reticent
- superficial and ostensible
- consistent and generally satisfactory
- sparse, scattershot
- dense legal
- recent and corrupt
- older, corrupt
- mighty brief
- difficult and seemingly hard
- admirable eclectic
- original but incorrect
- pure and unabridged
- somewhat corrupt and several
- characteristically sane
- emotional or exciting
- tiresome and stale
- manifestly faulty
- somewhat corrupt and fragmentary
- juvenile biographical
- authentic and standard
- little-known ancient
- complete african
- authoritative standard
- genuine and correct
- primitive and surest
- revolutionary buddhist
- immediately full
- weird, schizophrenic
- legible common
- raw plain
- erudite scientific
- later magical
- magisterial full
- strangely unprofitable
- other handwritten
- fine, endless
- profound and most pregnant
- afraid, unfamiliar
- convenient irish
- trustworthy and substantially complete
- _journal buddhist
- hard and seemingly cruel
- complete, unaltered
- intact original
- long bi-lingual
- babylonian ritual
- single or authoritative
- favorite evangelical
- corrupt bible
- pure shakespearian
- further unintelligible
- curious but not difficult
- plain standard
- straightforward, single
- surreptitious and inaccurate
- introductory and descriptive
- delicate and ominous
- meager explanatory
- german broad
- altogether unique and extraordinary
- practical and portable
- complete but very corrupt
- geographically western
- often keen and suggestive
- syro-occidental
- largely continuous
- true or original
- simple readable
- invariably definite
- invariably definite and concrete
- eclectic syrian
- ***magical
- critical and admirable
- exceedingly poor and untrustworthy
- poor and untrustworthy
- late magical
- certain or standard
- extremely ingenious and plausible
- jewish standard
- solemn and menacing
- best or standard
- unaltered original
- older and very accurate
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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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