A Compendium of Adjectives
Systematic vocabulary, organized by semantic domain
Adjectives cluster into families. This compendium maps seven of them — emotion, character, aesthetic, epistemic, social, sensory, tonal — into tables and one interactive wheel that expose internal structure: intensity scales, virtue/vice poles, Aristotelian triads, blended dyads.
No claim to exhaustiveness. Boundaries between categories are fuzzy, and many adjectives belong to more than one register. Treat this as scaffolding, not a closed taxonomy.
IEmotion — Plutchik's wheel
Eight primary emotions as opposing pairs, each petal deepening toward the center as intensity grows. The eight gaps between petals mark the dyads — compound emotions formed by blending adjacent primaries. Tap a petal to see both the adjectives for feeling the emotion and the adjectives describing what causes it, at that intensity. Tap a dyad pill for the compound vocabulary.
Tap any petal or dyad to reveal its adjectives.
IICharacter — the Aristotelian triad
Stable dispositions, not passing states. Arranged as Aristotelian triads: deficiency and excess are both vices, with the virtue holding the middle. For some axes, the excess form is culturally specific to English; treat those cells lightly.
IIIAesthetic register
Style, taste, sensibility. These don't pair into clean opposites — minimalism and ornateness are poles, but kitsch has no opposite — so they're arranged as a grid of moods rather than a spectrum.
IVEpistemic stance
How a person holds beliefs — their posture toward evidence, certainty, and inquiry. Several of these axes are genuinely Aristotelian (skepticism balanced between credulity and cynicism) but the binary form is more commonly how they're invoked.
VIPhysical and sensory
The tactile world: brightness, volume, texture, temperature. These are mostly neutral-descriptive — no moral valence — but they carry the evocative weight a writer needs to make a scene feel real.
VIITonal and dramatic
Adjectives describing situations and narratives rather than things or people. This is how writers describe the shape of events — tragic, farcical, ominous, sublime. Bridges into aesthetic territory at the sublime / epic end.
VSocial register
Markers of sophistication, manner, and cultural polish. These carry class and cultural weight — the adjectives exist and describe real social phenomena, but the poles aren't always morally weighted the way virtues are.