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 the legend

Below is a list of describing words for the legend. 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 legend:

  • local apocalyptic
  • underground european
  • demonstrably fictitious
  • incredible and demonstrably fictitious
  • beautiful monkish
  • rural ornithological
  • simple but mighty
  • attractive babylonian
  • job--rabbinical
  • grim buddhist
  • ancient and queer
  • slightest or most fantastic
  • rigidly true
  • common and most glorious
  • impossible, merest
  • ritual and popular
  • composite egyptian
  • interesting bulgarian
  • wonderful druidical
  • genuine tahitian
  • native arthurian
  • worcestershire fairy
  • same arthurian
  • indigenous quadrennial
  • oriental and northern
  • mischievous and antiscriptural
  • black, unhappy
  • eerie ancient
  • childish oriental
  • small inspirational
  • strange mediaeval
  • phantom, more
  • all-important, unknown
  • mostly urban
  • partly local
  • old gral
  • fanciful oriental
  • poetic and miraculous
  • obscure gondal
  • strange and almost grotesque
  • grotesquely idle
  • romantic and extremely absurd
  • merest trivial
  • sinister ritual
  • ridiculous and infamous
  • tragic celtic
  • burlesque and obscene
  • imaginary rabbinical
  • mystical or mythological
  • amusingly persistent
  • unoccupied, popular
  • singularly incredible
  • stupid jewish
  • nevertheless interesting and significant
  • miserable mediaeval
  • popular aztec
  • strange and strikingly beautiful
  • dull monkish
  • high-handed, prodigal
  • pious and monastic
  • analogous iranian
  • universal gaelic
  • primitive arthurian
  • romantic but perfectly historical
  • fancy, sublime
  • faintest and most unsatisfactory
  • old, prudential
  • special but brief
  • exuberant solomonic
  • long and mythical
  • dear but visionary
  • whole solomonic
  • immemorial poetic
  • veracious local
  • simple stern
  • full-blown arthurian
  • widespread and circumstantial
  • scandalous and absurd
  • primitive, popular
  • worldly personal
  • sacred popular
  • sporadic napoleonic
  • popular sicilian
  • great, resonant
  • wild, spectral
  • pathetic german
  • pious biblical
  • false, sweet
  • arthurian
  • authentic old
  • totally fictitious
  • untrue, pure
  • real, foggy
  • terrible and haunting
  • real gory
  • special localized
  • genuine mythological
  • richly complex
  • dire radiant
  • ornate german

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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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