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 five
Below is a list of describing words for the five. 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 five:
- metal, worth
- blue, worth
- canine cannibal
- pale other
- space-time and startling
- dull average
- still calm and dispassionate
- secret cabal
- entire, unreal
- gleeful high
- dead idiot
- twofold spiritual
- usual old-style
- steady inflationary
- windswept plain
- transparent cerametal
- old, nearer
- far newer and cleaner
- less unmotivated
- knee-deep or more
- intelligent bulgarian
- industrial, democratic and unclean
- circular net
- pure rock-crystal
- rear parallel
- minimum fine
- straight and precipitous
- initial highest
- emerald worth
- other worth
- painful next
- grave owing
- previous energetic
- best straight
- distant offshore
- awkward, endless
- seal worth
- dark and soggy
- highest paid-in
- nice, resounding
- miserable and surreal
- brave and buoyant
- drawn-out high
- souped-up old
- specific mysterious
- unknowable “final
- metallic high
- alpha alpha
- interval past
- democratic and unclean
- youngest scarce
- warlike zeal
- long, navigable
- famous cruel
- good, hefty
- last and bake
- scarce last
- harrowing and unexpected
- spacious and desirable
- pink purple
- soft adventurous
- lunar caustic
- provincial chief
- past, weary
- far newer
- dead easy
- solid cold
- alluvial plain
- precious exotic
- mental high
- safe, rational
- striking half-past
- discreet low
- previous big
- past miserable
- red pick-up
- circular portal
- newer and cleaner
- crucial last
- tedious, fruitless
- same, steady
- next and fantastic
- definite top
- damn ritual
- ritual and customary
- present worth
- long and despairing
- animal worth
- last paltry
- grey upland
- certain and clear
- ready and good
- tough, wild
- careless and slipshod
- brilliant and vehement
- ready full
- full and unquestionable
- maximum allowable
- little past
- present full
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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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