WHAT IS THIS?

This spring as part of our preparations for our annual Living Here publication, we asked readers to put life in Columbia into 10 words or less.

We received more than 200 responses, noting the good — like “a hot place to live a cool lifestyle” — and the not-so-good — “hot and boring.”

From those responses we created a “word cloud,” a visualization of the most frequently used words in those responses. We took submissions — some written as sentences, some as simple strings of words — and filtered them through a website called wordle.net to create this graphic. The larger words represent those most frequently used.

So enjoy this offbeat way of looking at Columbia. Click on the image for a larger view.