Canadian study finds that the word used most often in American tweets is ‘sh*t’

In an epic study of “national character stereotypes” in America and Canada as reflected on social media, language patterns and other sources, a Canadian research team has a telling finding.

“We collected 44,405,347 tweets, of which 37,066,693 yielded usable tokens after our filters were applied,” the McMaster University team wrote in their analysis, noting that Americans favor abundant use of slang, emojis and “netspeak” when they tweet.

And there was one more thing.

“American lexical choices show a clear relative preference for taboo words, including swear words, expletives, and racial slurs,” the study said, revealing that the most popular word in use was “sh*t.” And that was just the beginning.

In Canada, “great” was the most often used word in tweets.

“What we found is that if you go into Twitter and you quantify the most … characteristic language of Canadians and Americans, you find that that characteristic language really, really strongly matches the sort of established stereotypes of Canadians and Americans,” lead researcher Bryor Snefjella told National Public Radio.

“For Canada, you’re talking about words like ’great,’ ’amazing,’ ’awesome,’ ’thanks,’ being very characteristic. For Americans, it’s words like swear words of all kinds — and then a lot of words of that evoke negative emotional states like ’hate,’ ’miss,’ ’bored,’ ’tired.’ “