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 thoroughfare

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

  • narrow but populous
  • liveliest and brightest
  • broad, populous
  • squalid and wide
  • paved and nearly empty
  • dull but respectable
  • widest and most ornate
  • small, populous
  • barren and hungry
  • grim narrow
  • adjacent one-way
  • narrowest and steepest
  • fetid narrow
  • narrower, quieter
  • busy, respectable
  • broad, triumphant
  • pleasant and exclusive
  • mensely wide
  • swanky residential
  • noisy and populous
  • tumultuous and shabby
  • squalid, narrow
  • scintillating nocturnal
  • natural and only good
  • squalid and narrow
  • narrow but convenient
  • proud and amazing
  • distinctly dingy
  • costliest, best
  • hot, sordid
  • broad and exceedingly useful
  • broad well-lighted
  • national cheap
  • narrow but delightful
  • respectable broad
  • dazzling main
  • singularly arid and dusty
  • chief and public
  • heretofore undesirable
  • crooked and heretofore undesirable
  • vita-crystal paved
  • long but very spacious
  • singularly picturesque but inconvenient
  • interminable crooked
  • long and somewhat dingy
  • continuous broad
  • ordinarily well-regulated
  • out-of-the-way suburban
  • muddy, depressing
  • paved and busy
  • prosaic, interminable
  • narrow and important
  • immensely distinctive
  • narrow but immensely distinctive
  • undisputed chief
  • expeditious and practicable
  • fantastically empty
  • depressing and sordid
  • narrow but famous
  • dilapidated and unpaved
  • narrow, airless
  • broad and populous
  • splendid, cruel
  • bleak broad
  • huge chief
  • broad great
  • busy, narrow
  • venerable and important
  • widest and most resplendent
  • quiet but aristocratic
  • pitiful narrow
  • inner spinal
  • busy, jaded
  • brighter main
  • relatiely wide
  • muddy but busy
  • seedy but busy
  • magnificent metropolitan
  • huge and vacant
  • broad, brilliant
  • busy and handsome
  • broad, fashionable
  • singularly arid
  • long and populous
  • severe and depressing
  • short but very broad
  • suburban main
  • miserable, muddy
  • picturesque but inconvenient
  • narrow, splendid
  • blind and sinister
  • quiet and rather shabby
  • broad and fashionable
  • wide, ancient
  • sandy and uninviting
  • brilliant and most beautiful
  • superb broad
  • dingy and narrow
  • dull, noisy
  • main, muddy

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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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