 Thirty-seven English words for describing a person's appearance from espressoenglish.net. In this lesson, you're going to expand your vocabulary with thirty-seven words to describe a person's appearance. Let's begin with the word beautiful. In English, this word is mostly used for women. We use the word handsome for men. To describe beautiful women, we also have the words pretty, lovely, gorgeous, and stunning. Stunning means extremely beautiful, like a woman who is so beautiful that she attracts a lot of attention. Another expression to describe a woman like this is to say that she turns heads, implying that when she walks down the street, people turn their heads to focus their attention on her. The words attractive, good-looking, cute, and hot can be used for both men and women. Cute is a more playful word to say a person is attractive. We often use cute for children and baby animals. And the word hot is a slang word that you should only use during informal conversations among friends. It means someone is attractive and sexy. The opposite of beautiful or handsome is ugly, but that's a strong word. So most people express this idea using the negative form of one of the positive words. For example, she's not very attractive, or he's not so good-looking. Finally, there are the words plain and average. Those describe a person who is ordinary-looking, not especially beautiful or handsome, but not especially ugly either. Okay, now let's learn some words to describe body shape and size. You already know the basic words fat and thin, but there are many other ways to say these. A person who is fat can also be described as overweight, heavy, big, or large. The word for a person who is extremely fat is obese. We also have the word chubby to describe fat children, husky or heavy set to describe fat men, and plump or curvy to describe fat women. The word curvy has a more positive connotation, like the woman has a full, feminine body with curves. If you want to say a specific part of the body is fat, you can say it is flabby. For example, I hate my flabby stomach. We typically use flabby for arms, stomach, thighs, and butt. The opposite of fat is thin. Some alternative words are slim, slender, skinny, lean, wiry, petite, and lanky. In general, thin, slim, and slender are more positive, whereas skinny is often used as a criticism or a negative point. What about a person with an athletic body? You can describe him or her as muscular, fit, strong, in good shape, or ripped. Ripped is a slang word meaning that the person has very well-defined and visible muscles. To learn more vocabulary, join my Vocabulary Builder course, where you'll learn and practice more than 500 useful and interesting words in each level. Click on the link in the video or in the description for more information.