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 varieties
Below is a list of describing words for varieties. 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 varieties:
- widest
- startlingly unpleasant
- random and wholly unpredictable
- docile, green
- commonest italian
- rich and chaotic
- insane and uncanny
- longer satisfying
- cheaper human
- spectacularly efficient
- oftener present
- duller colored
- vulpine, black
- incredible and unimaginable
- madly tenacious
- soon-to-be extinct
- extinct intermediate
- non-functional, fatty
- fine, intermediate
- less gemlike
- wholly unpredictable
- rarer, long-stemmed
- unspeakable and sweet
- beautiful and endless
- complex and not uncommon
- loathsome and infinite
- high-minded and sorrowful
- assorted fantastic
- suitably high-minded and sorrowful
- hysterical, aggressive
- suitably high-minded
- dirty and underhanded
- accidental or congenital
- great casual
- congenital and accidental
- smaller, coastal
- particular botanical
- peculiarly urban
- enjoyable and little
- high and far-away
- similarly freakish
- colorless, abstract
- delightful and painful
- curiously persuasive
- so-called crisp
- young, conical
- dissimilarly coloured
- abundant and stunning
- certain grafted
- increasingly horrific
- permanent or true
- muddy, turkish
- necessary and easily imaginable
- vile and hysterical
- somewhat juicy and soft
- properly fluffy
- somewhat juicy
- wide and confusing
- scaly granular
- fantastic and audacious
- quite hard and thick
- harmonious and chordal
- excellent ill
- pleasing and yet substantial
- coastal or littoral
- great circumstantial
- such thousand-fold
- juicy, sour
- whole copious
- distinct domestic
- painful and very unpleasant
- inexpensive domestic
- tan and ruddy
- newer double
- new unleaded
- unessential and casual
- taller, uglier
- robust and productive
- smoky, intermittent
- cavernous and cystic
- wide and amusing
- transparent and coloured
- splendidly productive
- red and mammoth
- fair incessant
- solid, brittle
- absolutely new and original
- productive and delicious
- intrusive and unwelcome
- notably distinct
- profuse decorative
- trifling seminal
- commonest clinical
- fantastic and exquisitely beautiful
- infinite and irreconcilable
- variegated and golden
- changeable and singular
- superior wild
- extraordinary and rich
- culinary and hardy
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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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