The Word on Thompson: An Actor

A Fred Thompson "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. The words are the ones respondents to a national survey most frequently used to describe the candidates.

This cloud features respondents' associations with former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson. It includes the top forty-five words mentioned, each of which was cited by 5 or more people. The size of each word represents the number of people who said it. So in this instance, the biggest word, "actor," represents 143 people, the next largest, "conservative," represents 42, etc. More than 430 words were mentioned for Thompson by 41 percent of adults (38 percent expressed no opinion, 20 percent had never heard of him and 1 percent refused).

--Jennifer Agiesta