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 visage

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

  • whole waxen
  • intimidatingly competent
  • haggard, angular
  • smug, powerful
  • usually grim and stern
  • horrid and grim
  • unwelcome simian
  • dim frightful
  • copious, flexible
  • spotless and most excellent
  • pure, apostolic
  • grey and goggle-eyed
  • pallid, lengthy
  • blind, inhuman
  • scarcely mature
  • scarred, terrible
  • strong and darkly handsome
  • impassively hawkish
  • passionate, haggard
  • haughty and very wrinkled
  • duskily yellow
  • brave, brawny
  • ancient and sour
  • uncertain double
  • rude and weatherbeaten
  • artless and adorable
  • stolid purple
  • dark glaring
  • rugged, thoughtful
  • furrowed and pimpled
  • masterful bearded
  • fierce, mustached
  • ragged, honeycombed
  • savagely feline
  • already angular
  • inordinately cheerful
  • bronzed shaggy
  • pale and sour
  • sinister and swarthy
  • honest tanned
  • gaunt and cadaverous
  • exterior, long
  • mischievous, sardonic
  • majestic and ferocious
  • severe and repressive
  • withered, evil
  • dolefully maniacal
  • rough-hewn majestic
  • haughty and unsmiling
  • swarthily white
  • familiar grizzled
  • own quicksilver
  • otherwise infantile
  • radiant full
  • calm sedate
  • lean, pallid
  • sad, severe
  • sallow, bearded
  • outrageous, barbarous
  • absurd mustachioed
  • livid, red-faced
  • once horrible and comic
  • horrible and comic
  • craggy, photogenic
  • comfortingly lackadaisical
  • monstrous, faceless
  • expressionless, skeletal
  • famous brutish
  • hitherto cheerful
  • pale, alien
  • coldly horrific
  • hideous exotic
  • beautiful and irresistible
  • austere long
  • thy monstrous
  • smooth, trusting
  • horned, bloated
  • sharp, expressionless
  • wide, bullish
  • shrewd and good-natured
  • bold, jovial
  • grim glad
  • bronzed and insolent
  • livid, half-starved
  • inflamed and wrathful
  • feigned solemn
  • saintly sallow
  • resolute and gloomy
  • bodied, thin
  • bloodless, pale
  • oval prominent
  • rugged, cadaverous
  • withered and malignant
  • sharp and swarthy
  • stony and placid
  • cruel and grim
  • villanously attractive
  • grim, wrinkled
  • grotesque and ancient
  • sunken and haggard

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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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