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 whims
Below is a list of describing words for whims. 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 whims:
- malicious and superstitious
- soulless inexplicable
- light-hearted and romantic
- strange, apostolic
- fancy and capricious
- crazy and criminal
- fleeting and foolish
- not-quite-casual
- perverse tribal
- immediately historical
- gaeagraphical
- personal, arbitrary
- hatefully selfish
- unfortunate, unpleasant
- real and increasingly unpredictable
- mere crabbed
- slight and uninformed
- mere stubborn
- queer extravagant
- nonstop royal
- anarchical, drunken
- ordinary feline
- crazy and jealous
- fanciful, selfish
- calmly obstinate
- unreasonable, sentimental
- wild moody
- wayward, humorous
- exasperatingly uncritical
- morbid and terrible
- transitory and altogether personal
- perverse or angry
- peculiarly irksome and intolerable
- petty and common
- strange discontented
- fantastic, unaccountable
- your low
- uttermost crazy
- philosophical and supercelestial
- fanciful seeming
- irregular, poetical
- divine, ironic
- strange and almost cruel
- lewd and brutal
- mad jealous
- useless or extravagant
- superficial and sensational
- useless, amusing
- morbid, unaccountable
- insignificant and harmless
- foolish ducal
- cosmetic or technological
- pure fantastic
- ridiculous and disagreeable
- indescribable personal
- isartorial
- slightest erotic
- such isartorial
- peculiar rakish
- poisonous senile
- maybe drunken
- upheaval and irresponsible
- terribly incautious
- perverse creative
- arbitrary and barbaric
- arbitrary presidential
- perhaps amusing
- fanciful nineteenth-century
- grim great
- crabbed high-spirited
- mad and morbid
- family mere
- slightest and most unreasonable
- childish, sentimental
- slight or foolish
- fervent, peculiar
- absurd and obstinate
- altogether personal
- ridiculous and boyish
- peculiarly irksome
- last and most daring
- manicurial
- miserable teetotal
- little symptomatic
- merest idle
- avocational
- last and strangest
- grotesque and irregular
- intoxicating little
- stupid girlish
- mad imperial
- mere aquatic
- mere sacred
- poor restless
- cruel and capricious
- sudden female
metaphysical - random suicidal
- this-social
- foolish spur-of-the-moment
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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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