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 thatch

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

  • tangled, furry
  • foul sooty
  • fantastic sway-backed
  • magnificent reddish
  • ragged snowy
  • impervious and green
  • solid leafy
  • blessedly thick
  • perfect synthetic
  • own sun-bleached
  • thin yeller
  • thick and beetle-browed
  • dark, smoke-filled
  • sparse orange
  • black well-brushed
  • guileless sandy
  • previously thick
  • thin, auburn
  • scented and variegated
  • solid and venerable
  • blond, blood-soaked
  • imperfect rotten
  • riotous brown
  • short-cut brown
  • usual wiry
  • comical red
  • dark clumsy
  • preternaturally white
  • sodden wet
  • thin auburn
  • clean thick
  • dry and shrunken
  • greasy grey
  • dense shaggy
  • old lumpy
  • coarse short
  • little creamy
  • abnormally dense
  • deep and leafy
  • thick gray-black
  • deep and ancient
  • thick, blond
  • bright blonde
  • thick, straw-colored
  • shaggy golden
  • black stiff
  • smooth, handsome
  • coarse, wiry
  • dark russet
  • unruly brown
  • crinkly red
  • coarse wiry
  • bare and ragged
  • decent new
  • untidy grey
  • smooth short
  • short, grizzled
  • thick lustrous
  • away black
  • pale, shaggy
  • white bushy
  • now fresh
  • ratty brown
  • fresh, thick
  • plain, unadulterated
  • strong and warm
  • pudendal
  • less abundant
  • dense blue
  • soft blond
  • almost non-existent
  • thick grey
  • much rotten
  • dark triangular
  • nasty dirty
  • thick, ragged
  • curious triangular
  • wild grey
  • fresh clean
  • large, pleasant
  • sway-backed
  • short gray
  • heavy, sodden
  • auburn
  • dark, short
  • darker red
  • yellow-gray
  • dirty, unkempt
  • new golden
  • smooth grey
  • great bushy
  • thick brown
  • own thick
  • curly brown
  • gray and yellow
  • smoke-filled
  • narrow circular
  • twenty-six
  • dry brown
  • same yellow

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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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