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 theme
Below is a list of describing words for theme. 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 theme:
- well-stated martial
- fake-classical
- second subordinate
- darned foolish
- sinister lunar
- favorite and invidious
- major and most complex
- seductive and playful
- fertile and alarming
- alliterative cognate
- oddly corny
- restless, anguished
- cosmic philosophic
- vast and profoundly interesting
- continuous, deeper
- graceful, whimsical
- liquid, mystic
- recurrent but inexhaustible
- ever recurrent but inexhaustible
- apparently iconoclastic
- intricate variational
- profound and very difficult
- specifically contrapuntal
- exalted and intractable
- subtle and lofty
- transcendent and exalted
- central and constant
- particular and central
- offensive musical
- interesting or suitable
- fertile and plausible
- probably commonplace
- universal and glorious
- entirely transcendent
- thrilling and congenial
- curt and characteristic
- strong, curt and characteristic
- same and sorry
- weak and idle
- serious feminist
- stunning aquatic
- favorite journalistic
- popular oratorical
- gothic medieval
- inexhaustible and repetitive
- eternal and powerful
- stately lyrical
- already hypnotic
- fantasy-supernatural
- other fantasy-supernatural
- noble and profoundly human
- common autobiographical
- typically dramatic
- fond, ideal
- actually subordinate
- central but actually subordinate
- forceful martial
- clear choral
- well-worn but noble
- vast and many-sided
- single, necessary
- epoch-making tragic
- new and rather bleak
- familiar and inexhaustible
- deliberately fantastic
- apt and congenial
- heroic or ideal
- curious and copious
- sad principal
- characteristic principal
- wild, sinister
- loving hopeful
- exceedingly fertile and attractive
- plainer, steadier
- entire principal
- brassy, pompous
- hackneyed, hackneyed
- graceful and ingratiating
- fruitful and never-ending
- college--original
- perhaps abstruse
- perhaps abstruse and difficult
- isthmus--perennial
- abstract or wearisome
- unhappy and painful
- dramatic and mythological
- happily familiar
- balanced periodic
- complete main
- fruitful and pregnant
- unique, mysterious
- tragic, awe-inspiring
- last polemical
- rollickingly ludicrous
- trivial or inglorious
- quite lunar
- sad classical
- deep and fascinating
- suggestive and romantic
- promising and powerful
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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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