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 writers
Below is a list of describing words for writers. 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 writers:
- strongly thematic
- large, virtual
- piquant and humorous
- venerable juvenile
- profligate and amusing
- excellent but anonymous
- award-winning technical
- fine, forceful
- deeply fantastic
- renowned practical
- --historical and miscellaneous
- peculiarly pleasant and fascinating
- poignant and fascinating
- liveliest medical
- copious and popular
- clear-as-a-crystal
- obscure but wonderful
- principal deistical
- award-winning full-time
- facile and pleasing
- illiterate heavy
- christian-political
- gifted mystic
- many christian-political
- consistently able
- other atheistical
- chaotic and unequal
- old polemical
- reckless and defective
- obscure prophetical
- fantastic, voluptuous
- agreeable and ingenious
- impertinent, nonsensical
- trenchant german
- same well-informed
- myriad hopeful
- homosexual literary
- fantastic and paradoxical
- heterosexual commercial
- fierce and partial
- fairly practised
- innumerable unimportant
- prolific and gifted
- later ancient
- devout but careless
- fantastically virile
- chief editorial
- obscure or visionary
- voluminous and original
- purest modern
- talented and imaginative
- thoughtful and elegant
- recent colored
- hopeful unsold
- pious but obscure
- seriously hopeful
- immoral or offensive
- younger modern
- earlier nineteenth-century
- truly reputable
- scornful and powerful
- different, able
- major twenty-first-century
- gifted underground
- plainest and quickest
- platitudinous editorial
- bold, unconventional
- thoughtful and reputable
- advertisedly temperamental
- most free-trade
- wicked but witty
- enterprising special
- profound or most eloquent
- unfair orthodox
- political and deistical
- magnates--metrical
- divine and miscellaneous
- pathetic and vigorous
- judicious french
- poor but dishonorable
- pleasant and fascinating
- other dramatical
- peculiarly pleasant
- atheistic or infidel
- industrious and prolific
- older hydraulic
- voluminous miscellaneous
- former heraldic
- brilliant and wonderfully successful
- equally elegant and animated
- unknown public
- unscrupulous, irresponsible
- merely florid
- illiterate or sensational
- lengthy and drowsy
- french epigrammatic
- especially ready
- forcibly recent
- ready and versatile
- greater jewish
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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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