A Word on John Edwards

A John Edwards "tag cloud." (The Washington Post).

The jumble of words pictured above is called a tag cloud. We've created one for each of the front-runners profiled in the Post this week. Edwards will be featured in tomorrow's paper, following Sunday's Clinton profile and the Romney profile that ran today.

The words are the ones that respondents to a national survey most frequently used to describe the candidates.

This cloud features respondents' associations with former North Carolina senator John Edwards. It includes the top forty words mentioned, each of which was cited by 8 or more people. The size of each word represents the number of people who said it. So in this instance, the biggest word, "good," represents 49 people, the next largest, "liberal," represents 38, etc. More than 550 words were mentioned for Edwards by 56 percent of adults (34 percent expressed no opinion, 9 percent had never heard of him and 1 percent refused).

The source for the tag cloud is a Washington Post poll, conducted by telephone Nov. 28 to Dec. 2, among a random national sample of 1,007 adults. Field work conducted by ICR of Media, Pa.

--Jennifer Agiesta and Jon Cohen