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 train

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

  • woeful white
  • rapid and apparently random
  • kindly menial
  • quickest and nearest
  • once absurd and terrible
  • sumptuous special
  • vile, submissive
  • usual high-speed
  • long and purely abstract
  • shadowy funeral
  • imperial or presidential
  • martial and splendid
  • splendid and unarmed
  • deep and probably painful
  • good, fruity
  • long needless
  • fawning, timid
  • disingenuous and unsound
  • dark insurgent
  • slow suburban
  • noisy, old-fashioned
  • recurrent, dangerous
  • new, quick
  • systematic and remorseless
  • empty and expectant
  • small and saddened
  • dim terrific
  • wicked, ministerial
  • original two-wheel
  • precious fraternal
  • magnificent and most certain
  • your vestal
  • southbound local
  • thy planetary
  • last suburban
  • poetical and gloomy
  • loudly human
  • once absurd
  • remarkably sumptuous
  • extraordinary depressing
  • prosaic noisy
  • slower, emptier
  • dark-haired virgin
  • regular and irresistible
  • unbroken, funereal
  • fearful but curious
  • treacherous tartar
  • beloved, inseparable
  • unhappy concomitant
  • overcrowded and illiberal
  • lazy funeral
  • capricious and unprofitable
  • wonderfully smooth and easy
  • imperial extra
  • deep and instructive
  • dumb deserving
  • red-cheeked, affectionate
  • uneasy and gloomy
  • revolutionary-hospital
  • handsome lacy
  • fine transcontinental
  • fatally consecutive
  • wholly new and confusing
  • maddening local
  • slow local
  • single convoluted
  • gloomy funeral
  • obscure and numerous
  • numerous and martial
  • once-a-day
  • sophisticated long-distance
  • admirably cynical
  • now fateful
  • contrary but human
  • last phantom
  • placid and refreshing
  • deliciously placid and refreshing
  • deliciously placid
  • exactly humorous
  • heavy bridal
  • north-bound empty
  • terribly erotic
  • unusually self-critical
  • prodigious silken
  • subtly thrilling
  • uncommon slow
  • new and very startling
  • cheery musical
  • numerous and very fatal
  • giddy, fleeting
  • rapid and exalted
  • active but noiseless
  • fairy bridal
  • long vassal
  • bright and jocund
  • primitive, miniature
  • cheap or first-class
  • half-hourly electric
  • black shirtless
  • earliest outgoing

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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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