The Pudding

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Ideas debated in culture, explained with visual essays We wield original #data 📈, primary research, and interactivity.

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Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school this visual essay is for you. Link threaded!

A black and white line illustration of a book open about halfway with pages swirling around it. Accompanying text reads: Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise. We pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives.

the.pudding

Text on a black background that reads: Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”

English has lots of ways to make comparisons. “Eyes like daggers,” “razor-sharp wit.” Most of these figurative forms are difficult to extract from text at scale, but “as ___ as ___” is the exception. It has a rigid structure as shown in the diagram below:

Simile diagram:
Tenor: the thing being described
Ground: the shared quality (the adjective)
Vehicle: the comparison (noun)

She (tenor) was as still (ground) as a mouse (vehicle).

A black and white line illustration of William Shakespeare stacking blocks of each word of his famous quote: “To be or not to be that is the...” Accompanying text reads: Now that you’re up to speed, let’s put you in a writer’s mindset. What’s the first word you think of to fill in the blank below? My mouth has gone as dry as ____.

A histogram chart of the word occurrences for “as dry as ___.” “Bone” (+160), “Desert” (+160), and “Dust” (+130) are the top 3 most commonly used pairings. The chart has a gentle slope from there to less commonly used words. Accompanying text reads: If you picked bone, desert, or dust you found one of the top 3 pairings — they make up 43% of all usage. Most adjectives’ shape have a similar skewed distribution of nouns...

Continuation of the histogram from the previous image showing less common words with fewer than 20 occurrences like “leather,” “toast,” and “fish.” Accompanying text reads: ...but there are some key distinctions: Gentler slopes tell us there are no dominant idioms (example: “As broad as ___“). Many have a couple go-to nouns, then a long tail (example: “As big as ___“). The clichés are obvious, marked by a single tall spike that overshadows the others (example: “As cool as ___“).

A black and white line illustration of an anthropomorphic cool cucumber and the devil sitting at a table having coffee. The cucumber is blowing on the coffee to cool it off, while the devil is smiling at it’s flaming brew. Accompanying text reads: Now let’s flip it around. While most adjectives lean on a small set of go-to comparisons, the nouns do the opposite work: a handful get reused constantly, often to make different points.

To quantify this, we looked at the diversity of adjectives for each noun using the Simpson index: If you pick two similes for a noun at random, what is the chance that the adjectives match? For example, if you were to randomly look at two sentences with “cool as a ___,” there is a 92% chance they are both “cucumber.”

A beeswarm chart showing the predictability index (Simpson’s diversity score) for each word. The words are in bubbles sizes by the number of occurrences. Generalist words are to the left and specialist words are to the right. This image shows generalists including “stone,” “death,” and “child.” Accompanying text reads: Some nouns are generalists (seen in this image) and are wielded as comparisons for dozens of different adjectives...

A black and white line illustration of a sad dad with his arms crosses while Taylor Swift dazzles on stage in the background surrounded by adoring fans. Accompanying text reads: Of course, not all similes play it straight, some invert the expectation by using a contrasting quality of the noun, usually for humor.

“He looks about as happy as a dad at a Taylor Swift concert, but at least he’s in control of his rage.”

While these are a small subset of the dataset, a kind of plamigerent counterculture of the simile world, they often paint more vivid and memorable pictures. They tend to work best with positive-sentiment adjectives, setting up the noun as the punch line.

Text on a black background that reads: Explore the full interactive essay and all the ironic similes at the link in bio. Examples of ironic similes follow: “As sexy as earwax,” “As subtle as a mankini,” “as friendly as a hangnail.”

Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise

the.pudding

03/19/26

Many women who’ve done IVF call themselves warriors. Lam Thuy Vo is one of them. Follow her interactive journey through infertility, told from two perspectives: parent & child.

pudding.cool/2026…

pudding.cool

A Journey Through Infertility

the.pudding

02/18/26

Few life experiences feel as universal, across generations, as the pains and frustrations of trying to find clothes that fit. In our newest project we dive into the data about women’s sizing chaos.

A line and watercolor drawing of a teen girl with shoulder length brown hair, a purple t-shirt with a flower, green pants, and purple Converse sneakers. Above the teen in “ransom” letters text reads: “Fit for a Teen.” Below the teen text readsL “Women's clothing sizes fit more 15-year-old girls than grown adults. It's all part of a decades-long struggle for the average woman to find clothes that actually fit her body.”

the.pudding

A beeswarm plot of 100 line and watercolor 14-15 year old teen girls. The beeswarm horizontal x-axis spans between 20–60 inches for waistlines in women’s clothing. The teen from the first slide is the median and appears in the middle, around a 30 inch waist, with translates to a size 10 in women’s clothing. The rest of the teens appear clustered between 22–45 inches. Accompanying text reads: “By age 15, most girls can wear women’s clothing.”

A beeswarm plot of 100 line and watercolor 20+ year old women. The beeswarm horizontal x-axis spans between 20–60 inches for waistlines in women’s clothing. The median woman appears in the middle, around a 38 inch waist, with translates to a size 18 in women’s clothing. The rest of the women appear clustered between 27–55 inches, which half appearing beyond size 16, the cutoff for may brands. Accompanying text reads: “Eventually, over half of all adult women are pushed out of ‘Regular’ size ranges”

Dress forms are shown by size with a horizontal x-axis that spans between 22–42 inches for waistlines in women’s clothing. In 1995, forms went from size 2 (23 inches) to size 20 (37 inches). 2021 forms went from size 00 (25 inches) to size 20 (40 inches). Between 1995 and 2021 a size 8 increased by 2.5 inches. Accompanying text reads: “Vanity sizing has exploded over the last 30 years. A size 8 from 1995 is now roughly a size 2 today.”

A 3x3 grid of women’s body types: inverted triangle, top hourglass, oval, rectangle, hourglass, diamond, triangle, bottom hourglass, and spoon. These shapes are overlaid on the median woman’s shape, which most closely resembles a rectangle. Accompanying text reads: “And while studies show that only 12% of women have true hourglass body proportions... “

the.pudding

08/14/25

Ever cry while cutting an onion? Well, now you don’t have to! Building off of chef

@kenjilopezalt

, we found the mathematically optimal way to dice an onion.

*Cutting uniform pieces has not been proven to reduce crying, but you do get bragging rights.

Checkout the full project at the link in bio!

#onion #math #science #food #chef #cutting #dicing #data #datajournalism #journalism #datastorytelling #storytelling #datviz #chart #graph #thepudding