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 word
Below is a list of describing words for word. 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 word:
- crisp and noble
- sharp and waspish
- mere unproven
- heartfelt, personal
- deftly fitting
- single, weary
- barely satisfactory
- good four-letter
- fatherly straight-from-the-shoulder
- rare cryptic
- harsh or unkind
- wrong or idle
- short but imperious
- impudent and dictatorial
- harsh or impatient
- suitable four-letter
- single louder
- favorite four-letter
- single, incomprehensible
- occasional tactful
- single unkind
- wicked and harsh
- sure prophetic
- harsh or frightening
- obsolete dutch
- plainest and most vigorous
- harsh or vindictive
- vindictive, prescriptive
- thy literal
- hifalutin dirty
- secret sibilant
- ral angry
- absurd, antique
- expressive norwegian
- casual or inadvertent
- single, definitive
- chic, last
- angry or unkind
- fine and inaccurate
- acute or eloquent
- gentle or submissive
- phantom and empty
- obscene french
- shortest, shortest
- kindred german
- astonishingly inaccurate
- arrogant or indiscreet
- decisive, terrible
- nasty and derogatory
- apt and alliterative
- single mystic
- fine willowy
- injurious or very awkward
- unaccustomed last
- common but inexact
- little two-syllable
- tremely rude
- lengthy and somewhat daunting
- thoughtful, soft
- single ill-advised
- simpler, nastier
- horribly exact
- brief uncivil
- enigmatic and mystical
- bitter and dreary
- harsh or angry
- incontrovertible last
- smallest bitter
- foul or indecent
- unique and indubitably genuine
- old and still provincial
- hollow big
- hackneyed musical
- brave male
- venomous or foolish
- pleasant or merry
- cumulative descriptive
- common teutonic
- infinitely bitter
- least immodest
- low and delicious
- single legible
- momentary inadvertent
- slightest curt
- once innocuous
- next harsh
- yuultal
- single indiscreet
- covert or witty
- awkward arcane
- inarticulate, unintelligible
- beautifully predictive
- galactic basic
- �s�pecial
- �special foreign
- secret precautionary
- overly glorious
- nice bloodless
- particularly useful and interesting
- slightest equivocal
Popular Searches
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.
Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.
