Skip to main content

Words to describe…

Descriptive words grouped by what they describe, so the search for the right one starts in the right place.

Topics

Where the words come from

Seven of these pages follow the categories of Roget's 1911 thesaurus, which was built for exactly this job: finding a word by the idea behind it. The words are re-sorted by how common they are today, and a dagger marks one that was already obsolete in 1911. The personality page is different: it is Wiktionary's modern list of character adjectives, with a meaning for each.

Some topics writers ask about most — faces, eyes, hair, a character's appearance, and the metaphors and similes that describe them — have no open source good enough to build a page from. They are left out rather than filled with invented examples. Those pages will be written by hand.

Sources and licenses

  • Meanings, labels, and dates from English Wiktionary, by way of the kaikki.org extraction, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The lists derived from it are shared under the same license: read the data notice, or copy them from src/tools/thesaurus/generated/ in the Tabularia repository.
  • Categories and period vocabulary from the 1911 edition of Roget's Thesaurus, in the public domain. A dagger (†) marks a word its editors already called obsolete.
  • Words are ordered by how often they appear in modern English, measured with wordfreq.