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 theatre

Below is a list of describing words for theatre. 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 theatre:

  • tiny and tawdry
  • old unsuccessful
  • up-to-date and most intellectual
  • miserable imitative
  • impotent and homosexual
  • small metropolitan
  • average legitimate
  • falsely regal
  • memorial national
  • insolent and bloody
  • garish, indelicate
  • mechanical and picturesque
  • gigantic and sublime
  • permanent hungarian
  • humble transitory
  • new wagnerian
  • puny, melodramatic
  • exquisite olympian
  • classical and fashionable
  • present nacional
  • obscure municipal
  • formal open-air
  • public market--imperial
  • lonesome tragic
  • new open-air
  • vital canadian
  • lowest vagrant
  • certain five-cent
  • exclusive and high-class
  • cramped, provincial
  • ridiculous national
  • degraded german
  • national tragic
  • recent boundless
  • academic, artistic
  • picturesque and mechanical
  • ready-made and very serviceable
  • infirm and inadequate
  • private, shabby
  • vast athenian
  • luxurious open-air
  • chinese open-air
  • cheaper and nastier
  • spacious anatomical
  • small, unpopular
  • great and most heroic
  • permanent lyrical
  • royal escurial
  • usually incomparable
  • dingy, draughty
  • adjacent melodramatic
  • national norwegian
  • humble five-cent
  • charming diminutive
  • noisy, tawdry
  • dingy and draughty
  • solemn, dusty
  • cosmopolitan modern
  • wide and universal
  • southern naval
  • remotest provincial
  • despondent little
  • substantial and well-equipped
  • innermost universal
  • central cartesian
  • big, open-air
  • unlucky junior
  • beloved classic
  • regional itinerant
  • sunny, civilized
  • broad and conspicuous
  • imperial private
  • truly limited
  • first-class regular
  • gaudy wooden
  • temporary cheap
  • northern naval
  • boundless western
  • swanky modern
  • large and most artistic
  • small, third-class
  • small tin-roofed
  • simple elizabethan
  • “mechanical and picturesque
  • neat and modern
  • magnificent outdoor
  • first-rate provincial
  • general and most productive
  • huge, well-lighted
  • distant and secondary
  • superb and tasteful
  • poor pampered
  • whole cheerful
  • little prospective
  • western provincial
  • famous mechanical
  • first-rate musical
  • beautiful and far-famed
  • royal dramatic
  • next permanent

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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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