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 words
Below is a list of describing words for words. 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 words:
- archaic and provincial
- few gracious
- fewest and plainest
- few unintelligible
- apt and gracious
- crisp and noble
- louder, entire
- sharp and waspish
- tersely formal
- mainly hyphenated
- mere unproven
- flutingly sweet
- heartfelt, personal
- few indistinguishable
- few but careful
- luminous and hopeful
- admirable rich
- deftly fitting
- utter meaningless
- many articulate
- single, weary
- foolish and emotional
- few and futile
- few but emphatic
- barely satisfactory
- few, soft
- pitilessly accurate
- single succinct
- good four-letter
- utter memorable
- fatherly straight-from-the-shoulder
- fair witching
- own well-rehearsed
- metal, innocent
- sometimes feathered
- electly simple
- rare cryptic
- inadequate foul
- harsh or unkind
- plainest and fewest
- wrong or idle
- various unfrozen
- short but imperious
- utter ordinary
- fitting, luminous
- visible but inaudible
- mental or verbal
- radical big
- impudent and dictatorial
- macabre and foolish
- harsh or impatient
- rousing last
- nice grand
- meaningless, contradictory
- outwardly treasonous
- quietly sharp
- mute secret
- skeptical, cynical
- fewest and clearest
- chaste medical
- finite and quite rigid
- hardly legitimate
- rare and obsolete
- few and clear
- obsolete and unusual
- outlandish, unintelligible
- abrupt, haughty
- few but pregnant
- particular harmless
- fatal signal
- obliging but insignificant
- fewest and kindest
- gross ill
- brave and boastful
- few and random
- single compassionate
- terrible wonderful
- few inaudible
- suitable four-letter
- terminal key
- single louder
- pronouncing confident
- favorite four-letter
- few or fewer
- single, incomprehensible
- many odd-sounding
- occasional tactful
- softly striking
- single unkind
- few inspiring
- wicked and harsh
- few, hysterical
- sure prophetic
- polite, truthful and simple
- harsh or frightening
- unspoken brutal
- obsolete dutch
- hardest chinese
- plainest and most vigorous
- titanic and thunderous
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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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