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 usefulness
Below is a list of describing words for usefulness. 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 usefulness:
- vast present
- mere pragmatic
- simple and respectable
- immediately appreciable
- highest subsequent
- constant and praiseworthy
- minor curative
- practical substantial
- peculiar and indefatigable
- worth and vast
- elegant, social
- manifest and most awful
- mutual or joint
- peculiar and necessary
- solid, secular and social
- probable immediate
- immense coarse
- present palpable
- good and greatest
- utmost canine
- worth and practical
- specific mutual
- therapeutic or rather hygienic
- rather hygienic
- creative and administrative
- respective economic
- larger ministerial
- greatly pre-eminent
- safe ignominious
- signal and brilliant
- peaceful and beneficial
- wide and unselfish
- former practical
- literary and industrial
- permanent and practical
- wide industrial
- healthful, congenial
- mutual human
- utmost artistic
- possibly equal
- womanly
- pure descriptive
- striking special
- positive, concrete
- relative and temporary
- old and thy
- social and vocational
- extensive and general
- merely medical
- quiet, everyday
- large and genuine
- last conspicuous
- secular and social
- more selective
- general all-round
- strategic and economic
- great direct
- positive political
- essential social
- promising great
- solid practical
- potential social
- great ministerial
- interrogational
- eminent social
- therefore political
- vast potential
- actual, practical
- great and conspicuous
- tactical and strategical
- actual and practical
- simple and happy
- genuine social
- practical moral
- possible great
- better and larger
- humble and obscure
- practical religious
- great practical
- own extensive
- present and prospective
- greater public
- eminent public
- conspicuous public
- seemingly obvious
- little incidental
- certain unexpected
- great and general
- natural and moral
- certain potential
- constant, steady
- greatest physical
- great and permanent
- practical every-day
- great and extensive
- merely practical
- public and social
- efficient military
- quiet domestic
- --practical
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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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