Curated describing words grouped by what you are writing about — people, food, places, feelings, work and more. Each list is sorted by shade of meaning, with example sentences so you can hear how a word behaves before you use it.
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Curated describing words grouped by what you are writing about — people, food, places, feelings, work and more. Each list is sorted by shade of meaning, with example sentences so you can hear how a word behaves before you use it.
Most lists on this subject are lists of compliments. This one is not, and it says which is which: of the 106 words to describe a hard-working person below, 8 are not compliments at all and 17 depend entirely on the sentence. Plodding, obsessive and overzealous all describe someone who works hard, and none of…
Almost every company describes its culture in the same handful of words, and none of them survives contact with someone who has left. This page gives 90 words to describe company culture that are specific enough to be disagreed with, which is a good test to apply to any of them: a word the reader…
The striking thing about this vocabulary is how much of it is built out of negatives. 15 of the 62 words below say what a god is not, or cannot be: not knowable, not changeable, not created, not subject to death, not able to be got to the bottom of. That is not English running…
Most word lists for this subject describe the teacher. The search is usually for words to describe the teaching, and this page leads with those: 14 words for the lesson, then 15 for the person giving it, then three sections for how it lands, how the room is held, and what the job is like…
The vocabulary of fatherhood is older than people assume, and not in the places you would guess. Tender and playful are thirteenth-century words; nurture is fourteenth and affectionate fifteenth. The provision words that sound ancestral are the recent arrivals — reliable is first recorded in 1569 and dependable not until 1735. English had ways to…
A widely cited 2018 eye-tracking study by the job board Ladders put the first pass over a CV at about seven seconds. Treat the number as an illustration rather than a finding — it comes from a company with something to sell and thirty recruiters watched — but the direction is right, and adjectives are…
Integrity is hard to describe because most of the words for it describe only part of it. Honest covers what a person says. Consistent covers whether they say it on a bad day too. Neither covers the part that costs something. This page gives 60 adjectives for integrity, sorted into the three things the idea…
Most words used about students are used badly. Bright praises a fixed quality the student did nothing to earn; hard-working — which is not in the list below, and is left out on purpose — praises effort so vaguely that it can mean anything. This page gives 88 adjectives for students, sorted by what they…
Writing about motherhood fails in one of two directions. Either every sentence reaches for selfless and unconditional until the words stop registering, or it goes so far the other way that the difficulty is all that is left. This page gives 80 words to describe motherhood, sorted into the five things people are usually trying…
The question comes in three forms — describe yourself, three words to describe yourself, how would a friend describe you — and they all fail the same way: people reach for hard-working, passionate and team player, which tell a listener nothing because everybody says them. This page gives 122 words to describe yourself, sorted by…
Grammar Simplified
Plain-English grammar guides and curated adjective lists. Free to read, checked against Merriam-Webster, Chicago and AP before publication.
219 grammar guides →