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 thinkers

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

  • grave and slow-moving
  • untrained, intuitive
  • clearest and most consecutive
  • freelance, free
  • lame and inexpert
  • ragged slow
  • independent and vigorous
  • extensive or discursive
  • usually competent
  • able and seasoned
  • willing or careful
  • serious and compassionate
  • thinker--original
  • capable, logical
  • original thinker--original
  • illuminating and original
  • gifted scientific
  • broad but not deep
  • other lax
  • great devout
  • poetical and suggestive
  • creative free
  • acute and independent
  • slouchy modern
  • quick and original
  • unorthodox but promising
  • so-called obsolete
  • truly devout and conscientious
  • profound and most original
  • original, profound and accurate
  • cool and quick
  • certain high-minded
  • predominantly contemplative
  • candid and philosophic
  • systematic speculative
  • unprepared and unscientific
  • ponderously profound
  • necessarily original
  • practical and genial
  • superficial and merely practical
  • singularly acute and deep
  • philosophical and non-philosophical
  • great but sober
  • profound ancient
  • erudite and independent
  • calmest and deepest
  • sometimes narrow and grim
  • honest and systematic
  • internationalist and free
  • independent and transitional
  • hard progressive
  • logically exact
  • logically exact and consistent
  • serious sensitive
  • deep and practised
  • original and solitary
  • eminent ethical
  • acute and liberal
  • brilliant jewish
  • notable free
  • weredefinitely free
  • demonic evil
  • humanitarian free
  • greatest pragmatic
  • like-minded, progressive
  • strong-willed, independent
  • countless uncritical
  • precise and metaphysical
  • logical, realistic
  • original but vague
  • mathematicians-real
  • original but somewhat eccentric
  • ancient materialistic
  • honest, strong
  • exploratory cosmic
  • rational, powerful and original
  • few prescient
  • small materialistic
  • superficial and profound
  • pert superficial
  • genuine independent
  • candid and clear
  • profound and clearest
  • profound and conscientious
  • vigorous reactionary
  • pert, superficial
  • certain slack
  • great or independent
  • strong severe
  • immediately revolutionary
  • clear-headed or accurate
  • deep or consistent
  • better, --practical
  • contemplative or delicately susceptible
  • local loose
  • unorthodox spanish
  • prominent astronomical
  • immensely careful
  • greatest stay-at-home
  • competent evolutionary

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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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