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 vocabulary
Below is a list of describing words for vocabulary. 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 vocabulary:
- small versatile
- one-word human
- international anatomical
- sparse and precise
- fourth unnamed
- proper harpy
- limited ultrasonic
- extensive innate
- limited but expressive
- technically limited
- definite and fairly large
- elementary spanish
- incomprehensible and wonderful
- sensuous, musical
- sensuous musical
- copious portuguese
- copious and pungent
- complete etymological
- whole abusive
- youthful but powerful
- inadequate technical
- mental secondary
- limited german
- extensive and colorful
- fine and adequate
- wide-ranging mutual
- functionally limited
- distinctive and professional
- scanty italian
- current eastern
- wide and coloured
- impertinent and flippant
- meager military
- arbitrary private
- familiarly limited
- convenient workable
- pitiably limited
- brisk colloquial
- precisely formal
- precisely formal and logical
- full and facile
- significantly low
- whole invaluable
- variegated and rich
- cumbersome and inflexible
- copious and obedient
- long and arbitrary
- hybrid and bizarre
- rugged and grandiose
- full and refined
- old demagogic
- complete medico-legal
- virile original
- conventional harmonic
- thinly shaven
- richly redundant
- abundant and sophomoric
- prettiest obsolete
- artificial and sometimes grotesque
- academically limited
- ardent, sympathetic
- limited and very primitive
- extraordinarily rich and emphatic
- rich and emphatic
- limited but very useful
- free and lurid
- definitely poetical
- just austrian
- uncolloquial
- oldest poetic
- brief and monotonous
- better mutual
- small, basic
- extensive descriptive
- formal technical
- limitless profane
- rich and inventive
- entire gestural
- limited spanish
- limited joint
- awfully well-developed
- impressively vulgar
- precociously profane
- resolutely twelve-year-old
- incredibly limited
- incongruously nautical
- beautifully nasty
- rigidly standardized
- old-fashioned sexist
- fair-sized pseudo
- anatomical
- unmistakably inappropriate
- precisely apt
- shoddy somali
- archaic and technical
- colloquial and sophisticated
- innocent, fusty
- elizabethan poetic
- basic french
- tiny commonplace
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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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