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MAPPED: The most popular curse words in America, according to Twitter

MAPPED: The most popular curse words in America, according to Twitter

Matthew Speiser

Forensic Linguist Jack Grieve recently published a set of maps displaying the popularity of various curse words on Twitter in different parts of the country.

Grieve used roughly 9 billion geo-coded tweets collected by Diansheng Guo in 2013-14 and funded by Digging into Data to create the maps, according to the blog "Strong Language."

The blue-orange scale shows the frequency with which the word is used in tweets relative to the total number of words used in tweets in that county (which correlates strongly with population density). The more orange an area, the more frequently they use that curse word in comparison to other parts of the country. The scale goes 2.32 standard deviations above and below the national average for use of that curse word.