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 tone
Below is a list of describing words for tone. 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 tone:
- nasal, dictatorial
- impatient and dictatorial
- unwontedly serious
- still gruff
- crisp but persuasive
- louder, conversational
- bitter and serious
- somehow cautionary
- flat but somehow cautionary
- proud quiet
- utterly reasonable
- buoyant mental
- kinder but still gruff
- humorously furtive
- histrionically effeminate
- wishful childlike
- smoothly reasonable
- equitable and utterly reasonable
- crisp impersonal
- former, wistful
- bright compassionate
- appropriate meek
- flat, disapproving
- forcedly cheerful
- low, confidential
- firmly positive
- louder but reflective
- significantly weighted
- possible audible
- casual and complimentary
- calm and mildly curious
- surprisingly conversational
- seductively coy
- tactfully expressionless
- properly distressed
- confident, pedantic
- slightly louder but reflective
- wildly facetious
- terse caustic
- ferociously triumphant
- brisk critical
- cunningly bland
- airy, confident
- somewhat peremptory and overbearing
- peremptory and overbearing
- calm, conversational
- incisive and positive
- mildly conversational
- oddly respectful
- warm indulgent
- enlightened and elegant
- less mellow
- mock cheerful
- ately wispy
- suddenly meek
- low and confidential
- sepulchrally forceful
- canting, emotional
- uneven electronic
- awful, calm
- incredibly bitter and full
- cold, ominous
- flatly disapproving
- distinct but reverential
- conspiratorially low
- slightly snippy
- soft, benign
- low and somehow horrible
- empty dial
- same, reasonable
- interested but doubtful
- still gruff and impatient
- poisonously reasonable
- soft but caustic
- respectful and confidential
- equally brittle
- deep, repressive
- cordial but somewhat lofty
- uncommonly bold and animated
- low, unwilling
- lower, sweeter
- passionate monotonous
- emphatic and tragic
- hearty and almost boyish
- careless and jocular
- discontented and haughty
- haughty and even insulting
- solemn and rather low
- confidentially lower
- sweet but not powerful
- impressive but conversational
- deep, autumnal
- perfectly conversational
- breathless and mournful
- slyly eager
- best festive
- usual, cynical
- primeval ochre
- impassive, distant
- false cheery
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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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