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 virtue
Below is a list of describing words for virtue. 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 virtue:
- substantial and genuine
- fugitive and cloistered
- intrinsic and peculiar
- important but unpopular
- peculiarly professional
- mystical and almost irrational
- tart cathartic
- pure and inflexible
- sub-celestial and merely human
- truly cardinal
- notorious, unassailable
- delicious and courageous
- equally delicious and courageous
- truly matrimonial
- drowsy and rheumatic
- philosophical and generous
- overt and simple
- pious and social
- miraculous and prolific
- esoteric and exalted
- main cardinal
- boreal or northern
- southern or austral
- positively blatant
- chivalrous and royal
- verbal and practical
- actual avenging
- miraculous great
- graceful calm
- highest sacramental
- proper or relative
- outward moral
- loud, uneasy
- biblical and apostolic
- lazy or pedantic
- sturdy and natural
- tame and easy
- cautious, jealous
- immaculate and inaccessible
- mysterious apostolic
- intrinsic and magical
- rough and horrible
- harder and rarer
- noble but passive
- putative feminine
- untried and cloistered
- instinctive heroic
- superior feminist
- excellent and very necessary
- patriotic republican
- benevolent, amiable
- rare outworn
- especially high and unusual
- grand and prominent
- aggressive and malignant
- severe republican
- special digestive
- always ancient
- meek studious
- rare and inimitable
- vulgar, middle-class
- mere unaided
- transcendent and fundamental
- celestial conscious
- stern antique
- outstanding japanese
- permanent, hereditary
- merely human and civic
- secret nutritive
- mild and inactive
- human or even canine
- therefore theological
- unknown and doubtful
- instinctive, reckless
- cunning and apparent
- magnetical attractive
- secret latent
- proud, untouched
- almost civic
- whole intrinsic
- chaste submissive
- crowning human
- sublime and almost incredible
- serene, flawless
- stern, simple
- potent ethereal
- rare and intrepid
- high and incorruptible
- instinctive or customary
- worth and intrinsic
- heroic and most sensitive
- sternly implacable
- rudimentary or cardinal
- central and distinctive
- sweet and surprising
- superficial and easily practised
- remarkable talismanic
- preventive and mystic
- preservative military
- simple, uncomforted
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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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