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 translation

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

  • clingingly exact
  • instantaneous on-line
  • instantaneous and unconscious
  • good literal
  • extravagantly precise
  • [_metrical
  • contemporaneous chinese
  • permissibly free
  • mammoth and charming
  • faithful metrical
  • fairly literal
  • second-by-second verbal
  • literal and interlineal
  • supply rough
  • incorrect french
  • astonishing italian
  • stark and impossible
  • coarse and disappointing
  • imperfect anonymous
  • tedious and imperfect
  • abbreviated german
  • final hyper
  • best literal
  • literal and free
  • faithful, literal
  • commendable and effective
  • gross and finite
  • rude but literal
  • incorrect spanish
  • literal metrical
  • new and hitherto unpublished
  • other optimal
  • cheap and faulty
  • genuine hyperspatial
  • perfectly literal
  • normal hyper
  • free but substantially accurate
  • intense and faithful
  • astonishingly intense and faithful
  • terse but not inapt
  • sorry french
  • faithful literal
  • careful, literal
  • absurd, hasty
  • literal and strictly correct
  • fine, beautiful and noteworthy
  • extant elizabethan
  • able and correct
  • faithful and easy
  • careful literal
  • good but anonymous
  • conscientiously correct
  • common and verbal
  • certainly incorrect
  • superficial allegorical
  • free basic
  • high-quality professional
  • cheap online
  • fully intelligible
  • optimum inbound
  • automatic universal
  • massive hyper
  • admittedly imperfect
  • baldly literal
  • gay and daring
  • literal and complete
  • rude but spirited
  • real-time continuous
  • convincing but fraudulent
  • readable, workable
  • difficult or most accurate
  • brief hyper
  • iferal
  • grotesque, old
  • rather delicate and tricky
  • normal lazy
  • simultaneous pheromonal
  • parallel pheromonal
  • pheromonal simultaneous
  • gradual alpha
  • adequate two-way
  • rapid oral
  • readable poetic
  • notoriously wretched
  • dazzling and austere
  • impromptu impromptu
  • excellent, exact
  • full, readable
  • fair and literal
  • fair or even good
  • noblest and most spirited
  • effective literal
  • tolerably literal
  • spanish metrical
  • often obscure and ungrammatical
  • trustworthy and excellent
  • thoroughly trustworthy and excellent
  • able metrical
  • inefficient and rather absurd
  • arbitrary and literal

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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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