Whole body vibrations are integral part of our everyday life. People experience them in many forms in professional and private life, e.g. while using different means of transportation such as automobiles, ships or aircrafts or at music events. Occupational health studies have focused on health effects of whole body vibration for a long time. Technical development combined with a reduction of vibration levels of many products has put additional focus of research on evaluation of comfort and quality of vibrations, especially in the automotive industry. Contrary to psychoacoustic descriptors, such as loudness, pitch or timbre, comfort and quality are not independent of context and situation. To investigate context-independent descriptors for whole body vibrations multiple experiments were conducted in this study. In the first experiment, subjects experienced different typical whole body vibration signals. These signals included a variety of frequencies for pure and modulated sinusoidal signals as well as impulsive signals and noise signals. 38 different descriptive terms are the result of a free verbalization interview where the subjects described their tactile perceivable impression. In the second experiment all subjects evaluated the suitability of these terms for describing the whole body vibrations they experienced. The subjects were no experts for whole body vibrations. The goal was to find a suitable set of terms, that normal persons can intuitively use to describe and evaluate their perception.