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 waste

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

  • illegal solid
  • toxic and hazardous
  • dusky and indistinct
  • low-level radioactive
  • total, pitiful
  • pathless, limitless
  • perilous wide
  • sinful and lavish
  • urban solid
  • inadequate industrial
  • immense and completely uninhabited
  • barren, dreary and desolate
  • terrible, trivial
  • scandalous and shocking
  • unearthly polar
  • wild dazzling
  • industrial and domestic
  • dreadful, impossible
  • trivial and treeless
  • merely trivial and treeless
  • yon naked
  • desolate alkaline
  • desolate, brown
  • uninhabited low-lying
  • great and worthless
  • lifeless, stagnant
  • infectious human
  • real radioactive
  • barren and uninhabitable
  • endless arid
  • improper hazardous
  • hazardous and radioactive
  • liquid human
  • high-level radioactive
  • long-lived nuclear
  • yon turbulent
  • foolish, deliberate
  • silent, barren
  • foolish, finicky
  • dreary, rocky
  • sheer, sinful
  • immense and wanton
  • boundless, solitary
  • guilty and wanton
  • hazardous and industrial
  • prodigal and useless
  • desolate and watery
  • bare, soulless
  • yon remotest
  • horrid fatal
  • dangerous, trackless
  • simple conspicuous
  • useless, great
  • livid, desolate
  • unknown and seemingly boundless
  • weird, bleak
  • bumpy white
  • untreated human
  • gigantic scandalous
  • deep nuclear
  • stupid, paranoid
  • arid, pitiless
  • offal and human
  • aimless muddy
  • white and trackless
  • liquid radioactive
  • minimal solid
  • abysmal sunken
  • embarrassing and demeaning
  • sheer, pointless
  • worthless radioactive
  • vast toxic
  • stark, treeless
  • purple, barren
  • skyward rocky
  • appalling and incessant
  • plain and watery
  • vast and irrational
  • enormous and stupid
  • resultant watery
  • constant hideous
  • thoughtless, unnecessary
  • wide interminable
  • successfully total
  • shameful sinful
  • almost unproductive
  • broad gloomy
  • provincial and barren
  • desolate, alkaline
  • pathless, uninhabited
  • desolate and depressing
  • legal hazardous
  • hazardous chemical
  • dark unintelligible
  • unnoticed, long
  • wild and watery
  • beautiful, thy
  • domestic and industrial
  • canal toxic
  • low-grade nuclear

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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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