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 tragedy
Below is a list of describing words for tragedy. 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 tragedy:
- latest brutal
- simple, uncontrollable
- passive, sordid
- classic, cosmic
- cruel and inauspicious
- devastating personal
- fifth nameless
- bitterly human
- unsuspected and ridiculous
- main enormous
- current ongoing
- say-great
- sad and needless
- full, ludicrous
- mawkish contemporary
- downright deep
- unadorned little
- appalling and calamitous
- luckily anonymous
- greatly french
- true and allowable
- red and grim
- incredible, pitiful
- quiet, endless
- horrible unrelenting
- further mortal
- profound theatrical
- ancient, final
- emotional, childish
- steady lurid
- whole impending
- strange, loathsome
- colossally useless
- partly sordid
- pathetic and partly sordid
- frigid and bombastic
- splendid fragmentary
- virtuous and didactic
- unendurable european
- artificial and declamatory
- old and immature
- next biblical
- atrocious domestic
- ruthless and pathetic
- wonderful unimpassioned
- whole grievous
- major shakespearean
- huge, greater
- big sinister
- tremendous universal
- prototypical canadian
- bizarre and unspeakable
- bloated, icy
- commonplace rural
- sad international
- sad and fantastic
- sordid or brave
- brutal and needless
- appalling and almost unbelievable
- sharp unconquerable
- triple domestic
- sinister and scandalous
- sad and unnecessary
- portentous human
- drab domestic
- tricky, false
- horrible realistic
- old russet-colored
- sufficiently poignant
- superior and really admirable
- brutally immediate
- domestic or bourgeois
- occasionally juvenile
- whole unuttered
- fierce, abrupt
- grim, domestic
- national and indeed international
- profound, musical
- fine, poignant
- small but poignant
- inexpressibly heart-rending
- revolting and repellent
- certain impelling
- dull psychological
- inexorable and inexplicable
- unexpected but very real
- sordid inner
- ancient, comic
- pathetic and repellent
- continuous and unspeakable
- great and piteous
- bitterly heart-rending
- stark utter
- inexorable spiritual
- somber and haunting
- nearer red
- fine anonymous
- burlesque and sordid
- dismal and unnecessary
- misty half-understood
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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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