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 today
Below is a list of describing words for today. 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 today:
- actually closer
- little trigger-happy
- orphan, alive
- less taut
- criminal pejorative
- harpy alive
- weatheral
- utterly indecent
- certainly smug
- markedly richer
- palest mauve
- still appropriate
- especially glum
- unaccountably wise
- dead fairy
- certainly touchy
- clunky and almost victorian
- little mammal
- similar alive
- incurably tame
- especially watchful
- many alive
- particularly frigid
- long and so hard
- remarkably applicable
- definitely looser
- still wrong
- especially vibrant
- dal alive
- kinda bumpy
- always rainy
- damn peppy
- unusually dumb
- especially grey
- middle-class present
- inherent characteristic
- remarkably noticeable
- else alive
- unusually inventive
- still secular
- determinedly informal
- downright sassy
- pale and funny
- especially hot and humid
- bright and warmer
- terribly dizzy
- sad or solemn
- red and waist-length
- else odd
- different, fresh
- specially quiet
- marginally cool
- particularly edgy
- remarkably insightful
- altogether extinct
- dull and red
- longer impossible
- extant and available
- sure empty
- moral daring
- rather indisposed
- economically liberal
- fearfully busy
- human alive
- more topical
- still relevant
- little dense
- awfully chipper
- still smart
- fresh and visually stunning
- entire avant-garde
- overly common
- ordinarily disagreeable
- uncommonly gray
- untoward happy
- damned broody
- especially amenable
- unusually morose
- unduly sluggish
- exceptionally moody
- rare cold
- especially radiant
- prohibitive favorite
- heavy retail
- tly readable
- acceptable and legal
- awfully jumpy
- hardly shady
- unusually opaque
- foolish or painful
- inconceivably weird
- typical original
- evocative and bizarre
- asian carnival
- therefore imperative
- practically unobtainable
- therefore impossible
- contemporary appeal
- virtually obsolete
- abnormally degraded and unhappy
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
