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 traits
Below is a list of describing words for traits. 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 traits:
- riotous human
- useful physiological
- many anthropomorphic
- simian tribal
- unpleasant familial
- discerning commendable
- prime survival
- inconveniently journalistic
- certain transmissible
- slightest undesirable
- bright and even beautiful
- dangerously misleading
- helena--personal
- aboriginal primitive
- diagnostic single
- such expendable
- unusual male
- pacific and agricultural
- charming hereditary
- repellent and inexplicable
- verifiable and measurable
- salient or distinctive
- definite psychotic
- distinctive or characteristic
- shrewd and masterful
- deeply fascist
- western ideological
- strongest inherent
- feline or canine
- fresh zoological
- quaint or human
- valuable survival
- contradictory and illogical
- formidable survival
- genetic and biochemical
- unreasonable and solely human
- masculine and merciless
- obvious and incessant
- lovely rugged
- new beauteous
- regular simian
- interesting oblique
- typical and individual
- strong and revolting
- noticeable and astounding
- edifying human
- ancient peaceable
- unindustrial archaic
- morbid ancestral
- few uglier
- primal and original
- uniquely japanese
- dominant genetic
- irrepressible warlike
- basic characteristic
- own literal-minded
- ultimately heroic
- nice obvious
- rather obsessive
- pointlessly admirable
- decent survival
- unique, inborn
- singular and hitherto unknown
- evolutionarily selective
- obvious vestigial
- soft and very human
- visible somatic
- normal piratical
- diverse racial
- complementary and significant
- necessary mutational
- visible and peculiar
- violent hereditary
- new or fleeting
- delicately divergent
- obvious or characteristic
- stodgy and reliable
- shockingly reprehensible
- antisocial and abnormal
- regrettable human
- socially noble and ignoble
- notable and somewhat unusual
- socially noble
- subtle infantile
- grossly unsocial
- lofty generous
- distinctively egyptian
- satirical personal
- conspicuous jewish
- capital and hereditary
- sordid and suspicious
- specific and hereditary
- now specific and hereditary
- curiously brutish
- obvious and latent
- unmistakably secondary
- native naturalistic
- inherent advantageous
- queer and questionable
- peculiar, unusual
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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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