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 ties

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

  • unbreakable fiscal
  • mysterious and most powerful
  • full-dress, white
  • better quick
  • initial closer
  • national or dimensional
  • motley feudal
  • strongest and dearest
  • regimental striped
  • strongest and most endearing
  • obscure but potent
  • fraternal and domestic
  • legal or carnal
  • financial or institutional
  • feverish, romantic
  • tenuous diplomatic
  • black four-in-hand
  • pseudo-matrimonial
  • weaker geographical
  • counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial
  • knotted maroon
  • economic, social and humanitarian
  • comic pink
  • knotted old-fashioned
  • blue elastic
  • mysterious and inalienable
  • prosperous purple
  • filial, kindred
  • flashy striped
  • territories--local
  • prettier green
  • asunder domestic
  • blue four-in-hand
  • weighty and sacred
  • classical clerical
  • new or embarrassing
  • _universal and common
  • other and uncongenial
  • rightfully closer
  • shabby rustic
  • unbroken historic
  • wide maroon
  • subtle deep
  • welcome economic
  • horrible mauve
  • tight, affectionate
  • dapper pearl-gray
  • closest emotional
  • quiet maroon
  • familial and sentimental
  • overly flashy
  • social and regimental
  • harmonious purple
  • long-established and dear
  • excessively loose
  • quite other and deeper
  • racial, political or patriotic
  • multitudinous personal
  • unbreakable mnemonic
  • innumerable and imperceptible
  • strict or definite
  • intimate and mystic
  • startlingly unorthodox
  • dearest domestic
  • frail all-powerful
  • strong and endless
  • nevertheless german
  • labor--social
  • such incongenial
  • psychologically distinct
  • few libidinal
  • personal intercollegiate
  • aforementioned finite
  • natural and traditional
  • dear innumerable
  • secular and local
  • domestic, religious and political
  • correspondingly somber
  • filial and social
  • scoreless
  • narrow striped
  • narrow four-in-hand
  • closer and dearer
  • strong, affectionate
  • closest natural
  • universal and common
  • legal or emotional
  • beige moire
  • finer sensible
  • long-standing informal
  • brilliantly maroon
  • deliberate dynastic
  • disproportionately generous
  • striped regimental
  • local and linear
  • extremely hypothetical
  • logical subtle
  • sober striped
  • ceremonial, local or national
  • repulsive loud

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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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