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 violet

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

  • blue and pregnant
  • virgin, virgin
  • white or azure
  • surprising pale
  • circular, sparkling
  • red, softer
  • fearsome, dark
  • blindingly hard
  • dear corporal
  • vermilion and lurid
  • ineffable transparent
  • sinister and smoky
  • brown or deep
  • red, reddish
  • pale, indeterminate
  • ultimate shadowy
  • green and spectral
  • sweet or purple
  • entirely deep
  • pale, deepest
  • black and diaphanous
  • gray or darkest
  • black, gray or darkest
  • single cool
  • clear, enchanting
  • green, pale
  • high ultra
  • green and most astringent
  • hungry, dazed
  • luminous, inquiring
  • tough, fanatical
  • intense, livid
  • green and faintest
  • low but brilliant
  • pink and ardent
  • magenta, acid
  • blue, hessian
  • purple or bluish
  • darkest and softest
  • turquoise, palest
  • crimson and raw
  • purple, cool
  • green and vague
  • softest richest
  • iridescent and delicate
  • purple or dark
  • grey or dingy
  • convex, pale
  • deepest sensible
  • yellow and vicious
  • colored pale
  • vigorous, deep
  • mauve, red
  • lilac, brown
  • yellow, next
  • gray and brownish
  • luscious double
  • orange nor more
  • large and rather plaintive
  • blue-eyed fragrant
  • watery, translucent
  • scarlet and soft
  • unfortunate flowered
  • huge, unopened
  • green and iridescent
  • faint and limpid
  • invisibly incandescent
  • blue scented
  • blue or pale
  • blue eyes--real
  • soft but vivid
  • leucocrystal
  • black or lurid
  • warm faint
  • deep and fiery
  • usual vibrant
  • delicate woodland
  • last fat
  • colored dark
  • again immaculate
  • infinitely sinister
  • own but clerical
  • hard ultra
  • potted african
  • pink and iridescent
  • azure and dusky
  • emerald, azure and dusky
  • intense deep
  • green and mystic
  • umber, rich
  • pink african
  • shy pubescent
  • brackish, smoky
  • rich univisual
  • smooth, luminous
  • impossibly cloudless
  • purple scented
  • proverbially intellectual and spiritual
  • proverbially intellectual
  • seductive dim

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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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