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 way

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

  • dim and perilous
  • carefully casual and indifferent
  • frank and impudent
  • expensive and safer
  • glib and confident
  • calmest and simplest
  • different and artificial
  • easiest and wealthiest
  • legal and reasonably honest
  • noble and distant
  • sure and safer
  • dear bumbling
  • unambiguous, simple
  • rude and serious
  • infernal satiric
  • imperious brisk
  • quick, fragmentary
  • weird and very approximate
  • inconspicuous and apparently unconscious
  • peculiarly violent and unusual
  • profane and unlawful
  • thoughtful and distinct
  • peculiarly thoughtful and distinct
  • dramatic and unmistakable
  • finite mathematical
  • shy bearish
  • mute and agile
  • obscure, sinister
  • wide pathless
  • fabulous and wonderful
  • surest, quickest
  • soft, automatic
  • unfathomable obsessive
  • feeble and childish
  • indulgent, proprietary
  • conspicuous, overblown
  • native magnificent
  • breezy old-time
  • casual, impulsive
  • fugitive, vagrant
  • fervent, fascinating
  • humorous and touchingly pathetic
  • absent and aimless
  • sinful, vulgar
  • ponderous judicial
  • systematic and serial
  • old, selfish
  • selfish, negative
  • long, longest
  • superior, irritating
  • benevolent, impartial
  • quiet forlorn
  • proper and safer
  • positive, human
  • casual but meaningful
  • circuitous and unlamented
  • colorless and indifferent
  • properly colorless and indifferent
  • properly colorless
  • bustling and business-like
  • quaint, patriarchal
  • impulsive and random
  • neat underhanded
  • high-sounding but miniature
  • brief autocratic
  • shortest and surest
  • surest and quickest
  • devious improbable
  • tireless, meticulous
  • casual, reckless
  • silent and careful
  • tangible and thrilling
  • steady but painfully slow
  • weary but hopeful
  • obtuse, symbolic
  • strange, unjust
  • rather greedy and selfish
  • half-digested, helter-skelter
  • calm and sane
  • quite natural and effortless
  • general and unofficial
  • gentle, indifferent
  • indolent and absent
  • plausibly indolent
  • plausibly indolent and absent
  • guileless affectionate
  • studiedly casual and indifferent
  • gratifying public-school
  • cordial, good-humored
  • wholly different and peculiar
  • unlawful or mysterious
  • clumsy and unsatisfactory
  • petty and nasty
  • highly peculiar and eccentric
  • normal, unquestioned
  • crooked and stony
  • abject and ignoble
  • weird, zealous
  • fierce, scary
  • particularly slow and painful

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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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