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 weakness

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

  • inherent and fatal
  • feigned equal
  • palpable and undisguised
  • amiable and natural
  • inherent and intrinsic
  • dangerous ongoing
  • influential aesthetic
  • intrinsic and primary
  • single amiable
  • apparent congenital
  • pitiful, reprehensible
  • miserable and impotent
  • billy--physical
  • pathological muscular
  • special temperamental
  • feigned momentary
  • inherent canadian
  • pitiful, ashamed
  • tranquil, soft
  • long-established and well-known
  • sufficiently excusable
  • sudden, craven
  • squalid physical
  • sudden, seeming
  • total captivating
  • true or possible
  • unsuspected internal
  • profane, misguided
  • miserable fevered
  • unacceptable feminine
  • human esthetic
  • nervous lost
  • tyre--general
  • worthless, much
  • pitiful and yet salutary
  • pardonable and well-nigh universal
  • real and pitiful
  • human and inveterate
  • hereditary and unavoidable
  • obscure sentimental
  • inherent and continual
  • newly apparent
  • pathologi-cal muscular
  • strange and dismaying
  • subtle, moral
  • simply scented
  • physical or accidental
  • childlike or appealing
  • human paternal
  • utter, piteous
  • inherent fatal
  • imply deplorable
  • contemptible, loathsome
  • irresponsible feminine
  • crippling physical
  • odd frustrating
  • mental intellectual
  • perilous numerical
  • shameful, shameful
  • unavoidable creatural
  • congenital or constitutional
  • original and amiable
  • hardly critical
  • corresponding numerical
  • former seminal
  • mysterious progressive
  • powers--physical
  • elemental powers--physical
  • amiable feminine
  • transient muscular
  • appealing physical
  • curious ingrained
  • tiniest human
  • perverse, headstrong
  • pitiful, fevered
  • commonest clerical
  • well-known coastal
  • overpowering moral
  • affectionate, hopeful
  • extreme cardiac
  • dominant and overweening
  • essential and very characteristic
  • dangerous structural
  • ever-present moral
  • excessive and even ridiculous
  • abject thy
  • despicable, inherent
  • natural, easy-going
  • quaint but reprehensible
  • utterly spiritual
  • serious but unavoidable
  • sheer temperamental
  • localized irritable
  • certain diaphanous
  • result--physical
  • result--physical and mental
  • actual inherent
  • peculiarly inherent
  • german systems--political
  • systems--political

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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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