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 things
Below is a list of describing words for things. 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 things:
- humorous, tragic
- sometimes paltry
- unhappy, far-off
- away childish
- hasty and regrettable
- utter perverse
- strangest and most unique
- unhappy far-off
- simple many
- wonderful and heartening
- awful, vile
- important simple
- disturbing uncomfortable
- cruel and utterly unexplainable
- slippery shapeless
- old pigeon-holed
- vile, savage
- few hundred-odd
- furtive wild
- mildly precious
- halfway interesting
- stupid, bashing
- ornery mechanical
- separatist and sacred
- other dressy
- stalwart noble
- huge animate
- queer sentient
- spectral and dreamy
- graceful, inspiring
- disturbing, haunting
- startling and historic
- bitter or scandalous
- dead and inorganic
- forth wondrous
- odd and luxurious
- translucent, iridescent
- limp and limp
- lesser unclean
- stupid, idiot
- possibly blasphemous
- strange and possibly blasphemous
- green voiceless
- curly fossil
- ponderous and substantial
- stupid, top-heavy
- hateful and grim
- however peaceful
- foolish but agreeable
- curious and contrary
- splendidly revolting
- easy and impossible
- mad, unbearable
- therefore animate
- not-mortal
- stupidly loyal
- wretchedly expensive
- childish and useless
- slightly dainty
- idle shallow
- fitting and excellent
- brave sublunary
- truly new and great
- aeviternal
- monstrous and artificial
- wanton, savage and cynical
- offensive and callously insensitive
- few animate
- dead or mechanical
- obstinate, reliable
- polite but infuriating
- countless horrid
- repellent, headless
- dizzy and colossal
- inner historical
- bipedal greenish
- terrible, distressing
- biologically impractical
- nasty, risky
- small or important
- other birdlike
- purple leggy
- delightful and most reasonable
- nastily portentous
- cumbersome stupid
- big syrupy
- wildest and brilliant
- however rosy
- wretched eminent
- unsaid many
- voluntarily subordinate
- incredible, such
- great steel-reinforced
- sumptuously unpleasant
- unmentionably horrible
- unlikely wrong
- loveliest and prettiest
- murky and secret
- unnatural and sophomoric
- also drinkable
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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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