Happiness and the English Language
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, 2011.0