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 water

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

  • total renewable
  • natural fresh
  • sparkling mineral
  • permanent fresh
  • yon wan
  • unlimited hot
  • cupful cold
  • iced mineral
  • much stagnant
  • clockwise warm
  • limited fresh
  • inadequate potable
  • dead low
  • fresh potable
  • quieter coastal
  • such shoal
  • clear but bitter
  • constantly high and low
  • meal and cold
  • grubby, blood-stained
  • dazzling warm
  • gorgeous turquoise
  • potable
  • clean, potable
  • hot, soapy
  • sufficient cold
  • commercially navigable
  • hot soapy
  • pleasant nearby
  • soapy, dirty
  • tepid, rusty
  • tolerably slack
  • sufficient lukewarm
  • lukewarm, soapy
  • tinglingly cold
  • fresh sulfurous
  • warm brackish
  • warm, soapy
  • hot and foamy
  • incredibly pure
  • nearby deep
  • simply hot
  • crystalline hot
  • nearly low
  • merely warm and flat
  • slightly brackish
  • cool, crystalline
  • muddy, benighted
  • much or however little
  • hotter, clean
  • cold or tepid
  • filthy canal
  • nearest liquid
  • stagnant, black
  • perceptibly higher
  • closest deep
  • limpid and sweet
  • immoderately rough
  • much shoal
  • largest fresh
  • brackish and unwholesome
  • sufficient hot
  • native hot
  • little lukewarm
  • solid, scarlet
  • awful fresh
  • faintly flavored
  • possibly cold
  • crystal tropical
  • deliciously cool and grateful
  • shallow tepid
  • plain mineral
  • cold but rather stale
  • slippery, soapy
  • delightfully warm and soft
  • excellent drinkable
  • longer luminous
  • dirty, stagnant
  • shallow or muddy
  • clear or soapy
  • icy, yellow
  • current and muddy
  • extremely muddy and unfit
  • current and calm
  • choppy ochre
  • opaque glassy
  • shallow limpid
  • rather brackish
  • stale, real
  • tepid mineral
  • glassy mauve
  • foamy dark
  • available potable
  • muddy and shallow
  • rusty hot
  • cold canal
  • ankle-deep, stagnant
  • stale canal
  • knee-deep murky
  • stinging, soapy

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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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