Happiness and the English Language [View all]

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim December 13, 2011 | 6:30 am


The words in four massive text databases — 361 billion words in 3.29 million books on Google Books, 9 billion words in 821 million tweets issued between 2008 and 2010, 1 billion words in 1.8 million New York Times articles published from 1987 to 2007, and 58.6 million words from the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs — were analyzed, collated and distilled into a list of most-used words, then scored on their emotional resonance. The result: English seems to be a happy language, with positive words used more often than negative.

In these graphs, negativity and positivity flow from left to right along the x-axes, and word frequency is measured on the y-axes.

Image: Kloumann et al./arXiv

Citation: “Positivity of the English language.” By Isabel M. Kloumann, Christopher M. Danforth, Kameron Decker Harris, Catherine A. Bliss, Peter Sheridan Dodds. arXiv, August 29, 2011.