Some examples? Serene is a better way to say “very calm.” Lavish is a fair substitute for “very fancy,” and adorable will suffice if you’re trying to say “very cute.”Īnother fun way to build your vocabulary is by bookmarking The New York Times’ “ Word of the Day” page, which will introduce you to words as well as show how often they’ve been used in Times’ articles during the past year and show you the word in context from a previous article. Looking to expand your vocabulary even more? Other vocabulary charts to help you better express yourself can be found online.įor example, Proofreading Services offers this chart of 128 words to help you curb your use of “very” and replace it with stronger adjectives. In all, there are 72 adjectives to link to your feelings. A third, outer ring gets even more specific. A secondary ring of words helps narrow those feelings down. The wheel has six core feelings: mad, scared, joyful, powerful, peaceful and sad. He arranged his feelings like a color wheel to display the primary ways human emotions are connected. Robert Plutchik, created in 1980 to show how all the different emotions are related. Gloria Willcox decades ago and has been used by several counseling centers and outreach groups as a way to help clients better describe their emotions. The idea came from American psychologist Dr. While the wheel is a great tool to help build your vocabulary, it actually was developed by Dr. Or, on the flip side, if your root feeling is sad, could it be stemming from feeling ashamed, or, even more specifically remorseful? a large wheel shape, with three inner circles broader emotional groups are in the center, and emotions become more specific as they move toward the edge. These are joy, fear, surprise, anger, trust, sadness, disgust, and anticipation. Created by psychologist Robert Plutchik, Ph.D., most modern versions of the emotion wheel have 8 core emotions at the center. For example, if you feel joyful, a more specific descriptor might be excited, which could then be refined even further to daring. An emotion wheel is a circular graph that depicts the range of human emotions and how they relate to one another. Or maybe burdensome? Toilsome?!Įnter the feelings wheel, which will help you pinpoint an adjective to accurately reflect how you’re feeling.

Unless you’re a poet or an expert wordsmith, finding exactly the right word to describe how you feel can be hard.

Wheel of emotions chart