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 introduction
Below is a list of describing words for the introduction. 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 introduction:
- form-al
- elementary and decidedly unique
- brutal and rather sudden
- gigantic unfinished
- new and facetious
- formal or profound
- short and methodical
- long, revelatory
- scarcely agreeable
- delightfully pedantic
- backgrounds--occasional
- liberal and charming
- excessively liberal and charming
- casual and secondary
- characteristically uncompromising
- loud and portentous
- casually polite
- convenient and judicious
- splendid, authoritative and comprehensive
- interesting, simple and suggestive
- infrequent and sporadic
- fearful and grand
- quietly illustrious
- worthy and comprehensive
- long but excellent
- rather long but excellent
- hearty and promising
- uncommonly interesting and well-informed
- incautious and imprudent
- harmless and instructive
- short but adequate
- fine english-language
- late formal
- lame, formal
- lengthy but necessary
- interior, imaginative
- lengthy critical
- medici--cardinal
- efficient and amusing
- well-written and appreciative
- indiscreet and unseasonable
- seemingly ingenious
- perpetual and dramatic
- gradual and harmonious
- hasty explanatory
- pleasant, well-written
- easiest and most attractive
- cautious and occasional
- globe--gradual
- globe--gradual and successive
- genial biographical
- attractive and informative
- long but inadequate
- clumsy, inappropriate
- singular previous
- truly ciceronian
- thoughtful and striking
- preparatory and gradual
- systematic and surreptitious
- present unseasonable
- civil personal
- informative historical
- pleasant and scholarly little
- dim and yet fascinating
- passionate, slow
- expedient and temporary
- gradual and educational
- feeble explanatory
- unprecedented stealthy
- serious and sufficient
- delightful imaginative
- official critical
- sympathetic and lucid
- readable and comprehensive
- normal possible
- customary orchestral
- superbly pleasing
- spirited orchestral
- blithe instrumental
- animated instrumental
- graphic and admirable
- canny and effective
- long and perhaps prosy
- admirably clear and simple
- whimsical, provocative
- awkward or haphazard
- decidedly unique
- roughly informal
- short and highly interesting
- lengthy and valuable
- knowledge--gradual
- necessary knowledge--gradual
- lucid, illuminating
- vivid and analytic
- impassioned orchestral
- somewhat formal and abrupt
- formal and abrupt
- possible and full
- beautiful and highly characteristic
- formal descriptive
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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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