We ’re all guilty of typing a " hahahaha " every now and then ( even if we ’re not in reality laughing ) or a " suuuuuuure " ( when we ’re definitely not sure of something ) , but an analysis of about 10 per centum of all tweets over an 8 - year time period ( around 100 billion in all ) , has shown that Twitter user are not afraid to include an elongated word or two .
thousand of these so - called “ stretchable Holy Writ ” were identified in tweets by researchers from the University of Vermont , Burlington , in the most comprehensive work to date of their use on societal media . example place from “ playyyyyyed ” to “ booooooobies ” , “ chelseaaaaaa ” to “ everrrrrrrrrry . ” The consumption of a rather emphatic “ pppppppplleeeaaaassseeeeeee ” was also spotted when users wanted to stand out to fame they were ask to be .
From this sampling , the authors of the study , published inPLOS ONE , make two traits to characterize the Word that they found . The first , counterbalance , bring up to the degree to which unlike letters tend to be repeated . For example “ hahahaha ” has a high point of proportionality , as both the “ h ” and the “ a ” are repeated every bit , whereas “ suuuuure ” has a lower grade of remainder as the “ u ” is repeated a lot more than the other letters .
The second feature is stretch , i.e. how long the watchword can go on for . light words or sounds ( such as “ ha ” ) were observe to have a higher stint as they are easy repeated . Longer Logos , on the other hand , lack this stretch ingathering , and often just had their final letter repeated , such as “ infinityyyy . ”
“ We were able to comprehensively accumulate and bet stretched Word like ' gooooooaaaalll ' and ' hahahaha ' , and map them across the two dimension of overall stretchiness and balance of stint , while developing new tools that will also assist in their continued linguistic study , and in other expanse , such as linguistic communication processing , augment dictionaries , meliorate search engines , analyzing the twist of sequences , and more , ” the authors of the study articulate in astatement .
One arena where sequences are of particular importance is genetics . The researchers hope that future oeuvre into the area , potentially looking at patterns of mistypings and misspellings , could cater a method acting to further our grasp on the genetic code .
