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 torture
Below is a list of describing words for torture. 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 torture:
- old or newer
- savage psychic
- same long-lived
- tedious psychological
- exquisite culinary
- verily slow
- untold and unseen
- subtle and intolerable
- continually terrible
- unimaginably cruel
- hideous and insulting
- unintentional but necessary
- shadowy and now familiar
- voiceless, inhuman
- sadistic, systematic
- atrocious mental
- superficial arithmetical
- sterile, splendid
- agonizing physical
- rather eternal
- exquisite mental
- bestially insensitive
- protracted and bestially insensitive
- fiendish and endless
- kelly further
- insupportable, excruciating
- carefully re-created
- separate, specific
- individual and excruciating
- dreadful, useless
- heathenish, self-inflicted
- refined and special
- worst eternal
- often horrid
- veritable but laudable
- profound, eternal
- delightfully slow
- alien fiendish
- straight mundane
- long, systematic
- slow, eventful
- sheer, unrelenting
- horrible and ingenious
- gastronomi-cal
- refined, modern
- ingenious but ultimately ineffective
- exact exquisite
- violent thy
- animal exquisite
- innermost, exquisite
- pain--physical
- great torture--mental
- torture--mental
- cruelly exquisite
- increasingly shameful
- hell--eternal
- devilish slow
- slow and indescribable
- self-denial and painful
- spiritual and fiendish
- slow and utter
- noiseless, pitiless
- sweet, unspeakable
- slow and fiendish
- systematic and legal
- purely horrible and repulsive
- unadulterated, exquisite
- incessant, abominable
- extreme and secret
- untold and endless
- unspeakable and cruel
- cruel, two-edged
- unspeakable and human
- merciless, unbroken
- quaint and unprecedented
- fierce, delightful
- unspeakable, self-inflicted
- inexplicable, unalloyed
- bitterest mental
- all-pervading, thrilling
- grotesque, obscene or ferocious
- obscene or ferocious
- hideous and eternal
- haunting, maddening
- safe but extreme
- universal and unavoidable
- severe unbroken
- acute and nervous
- indescribably acute
- indescribably acute and nervous
- thereby dreadful
- illicit and awful
- horrible and shameful
- untold, indescribable
- much self-imposed
- obvious and horrible
- last and keenest
- perfect exquisite
- physiological and moral
- sensual, tactile
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.
