Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise

Skip to main content<br>Comparisons<br>as Predictable as<br>the Sunrise<br>An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction.<br>By Russell Samora. Design & Illustration by Shelly Tan.

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.”<br>I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives.<br>To put you in a writer’s mindset, fill in the blank of the simile below.<br>My mouth has goneas dry as

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Above are real results from my extensive analysis of this specific form of simile. Once you start looking, you see them everywhere, from the classics like Jane Eyre to last year’s darling Heart the Lover.<br>Remain where you are till I return; be as still as a mouse.<br>— Jane Eyre, 1847

I’m like my mother, I’m as useless as a beggar in Calcutta.<br>— Heart the Lover, 2025

I had part of a cup of coffee and about half of some cake that was as hard as a rock.<br>— The Catcher in the Rye, 1951

They were of a greater variety this time—some as tiny as kittens , a few the size of wolves, and their skulls cobbled from every kind of animal.<br>— Katabasis, 2025

My mouth has gone as dry as sawdust.<br>— The Hunger Games, 2008

Sparrows, awake even at night, chittered in the rafters, high above men who sat with meager scatterings of field mushrooms and pond greens, buckets whose bottoms were populated with shrimp as slender as pins, and snails collected from village porches.<br>— A Guardian and a Thief, 2025

It offered twenty-one guest rooms, commanding sea views, and a lobby fireplace as big as a truck.<br>— All the Light we Cannot See, 2014

And Sunny remembered Ulla, who was so nonchalant about such matters that it made negotiations around sex as natural as a conversation between children playing in a sandbox.<br>— The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, 2025

Swipe to see examples.

I thought it would be a trivial exercise, but the more I poked around, the more questions I had.

Why “as ___ 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. “As ___ as ___” is the exception because of its rigid structure. This makes it the most reliable to parse programmatically while minimizing the need for human judgement. It’s also surprisingly common in all forms of fiction. So while it’s just a sample of figurative language, it provides a quantifiable glimpse into the topic.

Every Adjective has a Fingerprint<br>So that we’re on the same page, here is a structural diagram for this form of simile:<br>Tenor → the thing being described<br>Ground → the shared quality (adjective)<br>Vehicle → the comparison (noun)<br>My mouth has gone as dry as sawdust.

First, a notable disclaimer. We’ll mostly just look at a simplified version of this form; grounds that are adjectives, and vehicles that are nouns (specifically mono/bi-grams, i.e., one or two words). This reduces the noise in favor of a clearer signal. For example:<br>“You looked as surprised as a senator who’s passed a lie detector test.”<br>These one-offs can be fun and evocative if you know the context, but aren’t helpful when looking for data trends.<br>In similes, every adjective has a distinct shape. If you look at the usage of the nouns that follow, you can see whether an adjective is dominated by a single cliché or has range. Here is the shape of dry from our pop quiz.<br>As dry as

You’ll notice that the top 3—bone, desert, and dust—make up 43% of all usage, and there is a pretty quick drop-off after that with a long tail of rarer choices. Let’s zoom out to see the shape of more adjectives. Below, each tiny chart is an adjective, and its bars show the top 20 nouns it pairs with. I’ve included every adjective with at least 200 occurrences.

Most adjectives’ shape have a similar skewed distribution, with some key distinctions:<br>Gentler slopes tell us there are no dominant idioms.<br>Many have a couple go-to nouns, then a long tail.<br>The clichés are obvious, marked by a single tall spike that overshadows the others.<br>While some writers reach for a novel comparison to make it their own, most just want one that’s reliable and accessible. Check out this 1964 textbook Examine Your English, which implants the patterns from the start.<br>Plenty of these idioms have endured the test of time, like “as busy as a bee” or “as fit as a fiddle,” though many have fallen out of fashion in recent decades, like “as drunk as a lord” or “as rich as Croesus.”

Specialists and Generalists<br>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. Some are wielded as comparisons for dozens of different adjectives (generalists), while others are uniquely tied to a single...