When people are trying to convey a quantity, they will generally try to compare it to something that they think people already have a feel for. For example, ‘weighing as much as 10 elephants’ or ‘twice the area of a tennis court’. But people often come up with terrible comparisons, and this grates on my nerves. So I have done a little side project to generate comparisons for you. I named it ‘How many elephants’ as elephants (and Jumbo jets) seem to figure a lot in these comparisons.

It allows you to create comparisons for:

• Length/Height

• Area

• Volume

• Mass/Weight

• Time

• Velocity/Speed

• Energy

I might add more dimensions, such as force, acceleration and pressure, later on.

You can try it at http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/ .

It is just a single page of HTML + CSS + JQuery. I used Microsoft Copilot to generate the image and, as a sort of turbocharged Stackoverflow, to help me with the coding.

Did I miss a good comparison or make a mistake? Feel free to give some feedback in the comments.