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 youth

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

  • green unknowing
  • solitary downcast
  • limber, freckled
  • sturdy and apparently unimaginative
  • shallow, humorous
  • vague and inexperienced
  • fresh and stainless
  • thankful and reverent
  • dreamy, imaginative
  • loose-jointed lanky
  • tall, simple
  • beautiful and valiant
  • fresh-faced, handsome
  • slim but slippery
  • lazily impudent
  • bright-looking and handsome
  • strapping red-faced
  • universal and joyous
  • hardworking idealistic
  • green, unknowing
  • unknown adventurous
  • courageous and sensitive
  • turbulent commonplace
  • unwitting wise
  • skinny, dazed
  • difficult and truly dreadful
  • dark preternatural
  • common desperate
  • much tall
  • mere good-looking
  • vacant, thoughtless
  • happy unclouded
  • extravagant and ungoverned
  • doughty handsome
  • precocious jewish
  • gilded and insolent
  • incongruously ancient
  • shy, unknown
  • valiant and modest
  • thin and gangly black-haired
  • gangly black-haired
  • pallid and modest
  • slender, well-set
  • brief faustian
  • perfectly amiable and harmless
  • lusty, red-blooded
  • thinly gilded
  • bulgarian democratic
  • heavy and loutish
  • hot-tempered, cruel
  • rude, unknowing
  • chivalrous, well-bred
  • eager sentimental
  • perennial literary
  • blond, slight
  • vain and inexperienced
  • ardent, laborious
  • dead harmless
  • silly luxurious
  • fearful impetuous
  • splendid, active
  • brilliant and magnetic
  • sinful, inexperienced
  • utterly unbridled
  • vivacious, eager
  • handsome, hot-blooded
  • handsome and wrathful
  • hapless, pitiable
  • handsome, agile
  • crowning vigorous
  • fair and bright-eyed
  • home-keeping
  • strong and smart
  • almost gawky
  • ardent and austere
  • exceedingly wild and extravagant
  • deplorably stupid
  • white-haired brawny
  • devout and modest
  • idiot male
  • unfamiliar but wonderful
  • murderous, callous
  • brash, honest
  • unusually volatile
  • overweight redheaded
  • certainly impetuous
  • certainly impetuous and foolish
  • wiry, wide-eyed
  • quiet and unimposing
  • polite disdainful
  • hulking red-haired
  • wayward and idle
  • apparently unimaginative
  • queer, freakish
  • quadrapedal
  • squat blond
  • good-looking, expansive
  • shorter and handsomer
  • formerly affluent
  • intense black-haired

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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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