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 variety
Below is a list of describing words for variety. 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 variety:
- widest
- startlingly unpleasant
- random and wholly unpredictable
- docile, green
- commonest italian
- rich and chaotic
- insane and uncanny
- longer satisfying
- spectacularly efficient
- duller colored
- incredible and unimaginable
- soon-to-be extinct
- non-functional, fatty
- less gemlike
- wholly unpredictable
- rarer, long-stemmed
- unspeakable and sweet
- beautiful and endless
- complex and not uncommon
- loathsome and infinite
- assorted fantastic
- hysterical, aggressive
- dirty and underhanded
- great casual
- smaller, coastal
- particular botanical
- peculiarly urban
- high and far-away
- colorless, abstract
- curiously persuasive
- young, conical
- abundant and stunning
- increasingly horrific
- muddy, turkish
- vile and hysterical
- properly fluffy
- 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
- painful and very unpleasant
- tan and ruddy
- new unleaded
- taller, uglier
- smoky, intermittent
- wide and amusing
- splendidly productive
- fair incessant
- absolutely new and original
- intrusive and unwelcome
- profuse decorative
- commonest clinical
- infinite and irreconcilable
- changeable and singular
- extraordinary and rich
- wild and unusually good
- unusual and very wonderful
- peculiar and now extinct
- smaller and singular
- pure sooty
- oldest or primary
- strange and endless
- prodigious exterior
- distinct and definable
- curious and almost infinite
- brilliant and endless
- much and pleasant
- slightly smaller and darker
- darker and smaller
- brighter and slightly smaller
- almost romanesque
- commoner and healthier
- conventional rhenish
- rich and very nice
- remarkable and elegant
- inexhaustible rhythmic
- real straight-from-the-shoulder
- original or physiological
- apparently sceptical
- unconscious, plaintive
- judicious and agreeable
- sour or tart
- uncoated pale
- innumerable and unprecedented
- unaccountable and capricious
- tanned and soft
- fresh and delectable
- immense and unimaginable
- next valuable
- agreeable and almost necessary
- portly northern
- actually considerable
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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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