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 the critic
Below is a list of describing words for the critic. 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 the critic:
- justly contemptuous
- best and most trenchant
- acute congressional
- own toughest
- exacting or blase
- readable dramatic
- oriental musical
- skilful and dispassionate
- own severest
- constant and often vocal
- polite and rare
- tired and cynical
- coldest professional
- astute and trenchant
- practised and somewhat fastidious
- kindest and severest
- recent and ingenious
- revolutionary danish
- afterwards stern
- keener and equally sympathetic
- original and most eloquent
- sarcastic social
- timid orthodox
- discerning and indulgent
- fortunate or felicitous
- fossil dramatic
- unsafe textual
- competent or sympathetic
- laborious and wise
- admirable music-hall
- acute and lively spanish
- judicious british
- sympathetic and yet judicious
- great conjectural
- watchfully hostile
- despicable literary
- pitiless and positive
- acute or tasteful
- illustrious exegetical
- competent textual
- first-rate textual
- hostile and witty
- exceedingly hostile and witty
- cynical, destructive
- impartial and thoroughly reliable
- greatest higher
- nice or scientific
- severe verbal
- severe nautical
- delicate, sublime
- luminous, unconscious
- doctorow--cultural
- sometimes maddening
- pedantic and arrogant
- sometime musical
- mature and reflective
- noted british
- serious homicidal
- severest and most obstinate
- optimistic, sophisticated
- self-styled literary
- keener or kinder
- nether popular
- relentless and complacent
- finest biblical
- daring biblical
- classical textual
- dutch biblical
- trustworthy musical
- harsh and too powerful
- veritable sure
- greatest analytical
- profound dutch
- efficient dramatic
- able dramatic
- acute and cultured
- late dramatic
- gray-haired dramatic
- wise dramatic
- calm and successful
- evidently honest and impartial
- sufficiently ungracious
- clear and caustic
- subtle destructive
- modern austere
- superficial self-righteous
- agreeably ironic
- more case-hardened
- outspoken musical
- former unsympathetic
- formidable or effective
- inconvenient and disconcerting
- keen and pitiless
- trenchant and contemptuous
- impersonal but scathing
- observant swiss
- eminent georgian
- loyal, ever-present
- recent contemptuous
- eminent viennese
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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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