Analysis of similes in literature

For the Pudding, Russell Samora, with design and illustration by Shelly Tan, analyzed the words used in similes across popular fiction. Instead of just stopping at the obvious word counts, they get into the types of words, outliers, and ironic usage. On the simile “___ as hell”:

If we want to get pedantic, the first use with the exact structure (“as _ as _”) was from the 1954 novel The Refuge:

“‘Any woman with eyes like hers gets a reputation for being as sexy as hell, old boy.’”
This makes hell pretty unique in the dataset. Most nouns earn their place by embodying something, whereas hell just became another way to say “very.”