The list of adjectives people use to describe their mothers is diverse, but one of the more popular word choices is “loving.” Mothers are also often described as “caring,” “strong,” “generous” and “beautiful.”
According to a Huffington Post survey in honor of Mother’s Day 2014, “loving,” “strong” and “beautiful” were the top three adjectives used to describe mothers. The survey asked HuffPost Teen Pheed and Twitter followers to describe their moms using three words. Some of the other popular answers were “caring,” “hardworking,” “amazing” and “superwoman.” Not all of the answers were positive words, however. “Overprotective” and “annoying” also appeared on the list.
Katie Hafner, author of the 2013 memoir “Mother Daughter Me,” started asking her readers to describe their mothers in one word at her book readings. She found the results to be so compelling that she decided to assemble a word cloud representing the hundreds of adjectives she had collected. The larger a word appears in the cloud, the more often her readers cited it, creating what she says is a “powerful visual representation of how we collectively feel about our mothers.” As of May 2014, the most used adjectives in Hafner’s cloud were “loving,” “strong,” “generous,” “narcissist,” “unselfish,” “smart,” “caring,” “complicated,” “passive,” “angry,” “resilient,” “unpredictable,” “funny,” “kind,” “survivor,” “fiery,” “well-intentioned,” “unfulfilled,” “critical,” “creative” and “wonderful.”
