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 runners
Below is a list of describing words for the runners. 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 runners:
- uingly agile
- excellent long-distance
- blond, graceful
- great long-distance
- pitiful athenian
- slender, barren
- naked swift
- swiftest human
- small contraband
- long snotty
- best three-quarter
- slick independent
- regular contraband
- serious long-distance
- lightest and swiftest
- teal and yellow
- fleshy four-sided
- ardent long-distance
- french and savage
- ignorant or incautious
- rear scarlet
- amazing swift
- illusively daring
- perspiring native
- transient, barren
- steady, long-distance
- chief contraband
- longest winded
- fastest half-mile
- conscious and refreshed
- rarely elegant
- now conscious and refreshed
- capital, well-trained
- iced wooden
- immune native
- wonderful long-distance
- other swift-footed
- keen and hard
- cold, lazy
- swift and reliable
- greatest long-distance
- good, round-bottom
- effortless, tireless
- human-metal
- well-trained and practised
- humanmetal
- ragged, smoke-stained
- now tangled
- simple contraband
- silent, oiled
- noble swift
- fastest long-distance
- brand-new, virgin
- vicious long-distance
- regal red
- heavy-weight metal
- canny and resourceful
- especially interstellar
- tremendously lithe and limber
- especially nineteen-year-old
- quickest and fastest
- young underground
- clever long-distance
- greatest and quickest
- tenth clean
- up-to-date contraband
- entire left-hand
- already fitting
- noble and active
- easy or graceful
- one-time swift
- short subterranean
- supernaturally swift
- good long-distance
- slow and cumbersome
- same dark-haired
- most long-distance
- faint, bright
- especially solitary
- mighty swift
- narrow turkish
- successful long-distance
- few contraband
- still aspiring
- dark, sleek
- fresh scarlet
- swift, beautiful
- well-trained little
- broad single
- untrained young
- many scarlet
- old and threadbare
- fast long-distance
- threadbare oriental
- long basal
- sharpest, toughest
- active and swift
- nice oriental
- short diagonal
- same contraband
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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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