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 wood

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

  • spell-reversal
  • surely more and more
  • mellow, light-colored
  • red sandal
  • tough, fine-grained
  • damned porous
  • fine fire-resistant
  • ghostly moribund
  • sacred charred
  • blue or bare
  • contrary, lignite and fossil
  • lignite and fossil
  • wet or green
  • gloomy thick
  • white gilded
  • surely more
  • yellow sandal
  • dry, seasoned
  • precious hazel
  • supple and skeletal
  • eighteenth-century cherry
  • grey, bleached
  • powdered sandal
  • soft and moistened
  • rough, untouched
  • lighter, unburned
  • insufficient dry
  • hand-carved, petrified
  • rougher and thick
  • unfinished, naked
  • newly splintered
  • finely oiled
  • baked, dead
  • gloomy awe-inspiring
  • yellowish brittle
  • ribbed porous
  • thick and shady
  • merry green
  • poor or green
  • dusky, comfortable
  • spongy old
  • brittle rotten
  • newer old
  • pale and lustrous
  • dried-out, bleached
  • snowy, gloomy
  • dry decayed
  • coal and not much
  • dark perfumed
  • natural hazel
  • much petrified
  • sandal and citron
  • two-year-old or older
  • hard or dormant
  • perfectly hard or dormant
  • knotty hard
  • sodden outdoor
  • thinly gilt
  • idiotically hard
  • smooth, bleached
  • busted black
  • metal, charred
  • curved dark-brown
  • new, cherry
  • sweet, southern
  • stubborn, barren
  • real and precious
  • lighter or cheaper
  • hills-presumably local
  • charcoal and green
  • notoriously fossil
  • desolate shadowy
  • hard, indestructible
  • carved sandal
  • green or wet
  • bleak one-sided
  • dim druidical
  • cruel, sacred
  • never chopped
  • chopped sufficient
  • gay or lonely wild
  • mother-of-pearl and colored
  • dead deal
  • solid, reddish
  • dark and singularly hard
  • decayed and dead
  • heavy seasoned
  • merely sandal
  • imperfectly elastic
  • opposite beautiful
  • gloomy, venerable
  • further, gloomy
  • fibrous red
  • oddly striped
  • solid mundane
  • dry bituminous
  • plush and dark
  • fresh and boundless
  • pale striped
  • own one-inch

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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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