Concrete and abstract words: differences and examples

"She felt a deep uncertainty" and "She stood looking at the door without opening it" say the same thing. The first names it; the second shows it. And the difference can be measured.

Measuring vocabulary

Psycholinguists rate words on a numeric scale (typically 1 to 5 or 1 to 7) for how concrete they are and how easily they call up an image. English has large databases of these ratings covering tens of thousands of words, so you can score a text by averaging the values of its vocabulary.

What's being measured

Concreteness is how much of what you name exists physically. "Hammer" scores high; "justice," low. It's an experimentally validated scale: speakers were asked to rate thousands of words and the results were averaged.

Imageability is how easy it is to form a mental image. It resembles concreteness but doesn't match it: "ghost" is abstract and highly imageable.

Neither one is a grade

This is the most common mistake. A philosophical essay legitimately lives in the abstract, and forcing it into the concrete makes it poorer. An action scene written in abstract vocabulary, on the other hand, can't be seen.

The useful question is whether the result matches what the passage was meant to do. If you wrote a scene and it comes out abstract, there's something to revise.

The advice behind the data

"Show, don't tell" largely comes down to this: replacing the name of a state with its observable signs. Instead of "she was nervous," what was she doing with her hands?

Don't turn it into dogma. Sometimes the abstract word is exactly the one you need, and surrounding it with gestures only makes the passage longer.

Revising in layers

An average for the whole document gives you a sense of direction, but the useful unit is the passage. A reflection can rise toward the abstract, and the scene that supports it should bring us back to the body. To revise without cluttering the text with set dressing, make three passes:

1. Find the abstraction that matters. Don't swap out "guilt" or "freedom" on principle; identify which one is hiding an experience you haven't written yet.
2. Look for a perceptible signal. A moved object, a temperature, a posture or an action is usually enough. You don't need all five senses in every paragraph.
3. Bring the idea back when you need it. After showing, naming can close the line of thought. Concrete and abstract work best when they alternate.

Abstract: "Distrust grew between them."
Concrete: "He put his phone face down again before answering."

Save a copy of the draft before the sensory pass. That way you can compare and tell whether you made the scene visible or just weighed it down.

Concrete and abstract words FAQ

How do you measure whether a word is concrete or abstract?

With psycholinguistic norms: hundreds of speakers are asked to rate each word on a fixed scale according to whether it refers to something you can perceive with the senses, and the answers are averaged. There are validated databases for English with tens of thousands of words. The scores are an average of human judgments rather than the opinion of a program.

Is it better to write with concrete words?

It depends on what you're writing. In narrative and description, concrete language anchors the reader and makes the scene visible. In essays and reflection, abstraction is the natural tool of thought. What almost never works is abstraction for convenience: naming the emotion because it's easier than showing it.

What's the difference between concreteness and imageability?

Concreteness measures whether the referent exists physically; imageability measures whether it easily evokes a mental image. They usually go together, but not always: "unicorn" and "hell" don't exist and are highly imageable. For a writer, imageability is usually the more useful of the two.