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 photos
Below is a list of describing words for the photos. 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 photos:
- several sepia
- long-distance telescopic
- totally explicit
- badly unfocused
- usual trimensional
- winsome senior
- hazy aerial
- oddly murky
- thirty-one full-page
- clear colored
- eight-by-ten topless
- sexy nude
- pink and terrifying
- lewd, gruesome
- sickeningly sadistic
- conveniently blurry
- excellent and recent
- fuzzy black-and-white
- final closeup
- grainy, depressing
- scandalous sexual
- fat, last
- obviously high-quality
- enormous overblown
- good-quality eight-by-ten
- large, grainy
- graphic genital
- graphic black-and-white
- explicit eight-by-ten
- full-page nude
- good appraisal
- neat four-color
- fairly poor-quality
- single black-and-white
- grisly forensic
- old and bleached
- many high-altitude
- black-and-white trial
- several closeup
- official senior
- radiant, subtle
- old and grainy
- blurry aerial
- antiquated two-dimensional
- original full-strength
- clearly amateurish
- blurry, black-and-white
- two-page aerial
- latest aerial
- entirely pornographic
- pictures—typical
- real, four-man
- stark, black-and-white
- frayed sepia
- blurry black-and-white
- new, tighter
- grainy black-and-white
- several three-dimensional
- canadian official
- high-resolution orbital
- awful, hideous
- composite telescopic
- old infrared
- many glossy
- poor black-and-white
- great three-dimensional
- commonplace picturesque
- extremely damaging
- bad digital
- few infrared
- little senior
- original orbital
- ancient sepia
- own black-and-white
- famous flat
- enough recent
- unusual colored
- tiny, oval
- shiny moist
- glossy black-and-white
- eight-by-ten glossy
- peculiar black-and-white
- almost three-dimensional
- perfect black-and-white
- disturbingly erotic
- excellent up-to-date
- old, stiff
- ancient flat
- rough aerial
- few exclusive
- especially unusual
- blurry old
- small, leatherbound
- old sepia
- abominably poor
- seriously cute
- famous presidential
- spanish missionary
- poster-sized
- few surreptitious
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
