Describing WordsAdjectives for any noun, synonyms for any adjective

A noun to describe, or an adjective

Tone praise or criticism

Rarity

Nothing you type leaves your browser: the whole word list is downloaded once and searched on this page.

Describing words come from 7.4 billion adjective–noun pairs that Google parsed out of English books from 1900 to 2008 (syntactic n-grams). A word ranks high when books pair it with the noun far more often than chance would, with everyday words ahead of rare ones, words that sort rather than describe (national, northern) counting for less, and names (Atlantic, Norwegian) left out. Similar adjectives come from WordNet and the Moby thesaurus, ordered by how alike books use them. Tone is the VADER sentiment lexicon’s: it rates praise and criticism, so a word that sets a mood without judging, like dark, counts as neutral. Rarity is how often a word turns up in everyday text.

Saved words

Kept in this browser only. Tap a word to copy it.