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 themes
Below is a list of describing words for themes. 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 themes:
- well-stated martial
- fake-classical
- basic fantastic
- second subordinate
- darned foolish
- artistically expressible
- sinister lunar
- suggestive domestic
- favorite and invidious
- eral major
- major and most complex
- seductive and playful
- fertile and alarming
- alliterative cognate
- insipid musical
- oddly corny
- sour didactic
- restless, anguished
- cosmical and psychical
- cosmic philosophic
- political or speculative
- vast and profoundly interesting
- apparently far-off
- continuous, deeper
- indulgent placid
- graceful, whimsical
- liquid, mystic
- vast and cosmogonal
- recurrent but inexhaustible
- recondite and distant
- ever recurrent but inexhaustible
- persistent major
- apparently iconoclastic
- certain apocalyptic
- intricate variational
- prolific and genial
- profound and very difficult
- mythical or frivolous
- specifically contrapuntal
- moral, sociological or psychological
- exalted and intractable
- sociological or psychological
- subtle and lofty
- definite biblical
- transcendent and exalted
- simple vain
- central and constant
- pseudo-satirical
- particular and central
- subsequent pseudo-satirical
- offensive musical
- graver or subtler
- 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
- grandiose scarlet
- serious feminist
- standard science-fictional
- stunning aquatic
- morally trenchant
- favorite journalistic
- narrow, repetitive
- popular oratorical
- incessantly recurrent
- gothic medieval
- major and incessantly recurrent
- inexhaustible and repetitive
- clear large-scale
- eternal and powerful
- need-biblical
- stately lyrical
- col-nomical
- already hypnotic
- eternally momentous
- fantasy-supernatural
- literary and irish
- other fantasy-supernatural
- poetic or historical
- noble and profoundly human
- trifling or prosaic
- common autobiographical
- abnormal and sensational
- typically dramatic
- thoroughly tragic
- fond, ideal
- earliest, characteristic
- actually subordinate
- melodious and characteristic
- central but actually subordinate
- stale and trivial
- forceful martial
- historical and partly mythical
- clear choral
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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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