Researchers at Dartmouth have analyzed over 180 million tweets from 900,000 users in the United States — and they've come up with a list of the new abbreviated words that spread on Twitter.
But, hey, 140 characters, that's not so many. Maybe we're just shortening our words to avoid hitting our character limit? Not so much, NPR's All Tech Considered reports. The average tweet using abbreviated words comes in at just under 90 characters. And, while the origins of some words are pretty obvi, some are much less so:
When searching for the East Coast equivalent of the word "hella" (you know, "a lot"), which likely stems from "helluva" or "hellacious" and is associated with the West Coast, Reddy says her team expected to see appearances of "wicked" or "mad." Instead, they found the phrase "od" or "odee" used in the same way. "Just like you'd say, 'Oh, it's hella great, people would say, 'It's odee great,' " Reddy explains.
She thinks "OD" or "odee" might be a shortened form of "overdose"; others think it might be a clipping of "overdoing." Search for "odee" on Twitter and you'll see these types of tweets: "My chest pump this morning was Odee crazy! Found this new 30 minute workout ... " or "My hairs getting odee long."
Here are the new words they've come up with so far, via NPR:
adorb (adorable)
adorbs (adorable)
alc (alcohol)
awk (awkward)
awks (awkward)
choreo (choreography)
collab (collaboration)
cray (crazy)
craycray (crazy)
defs (definitely)
delish (delicious)
fams (family)
gorg (gorgeous)
hilar (hilarious)
hilars (hilarious)
jelly (jealous)
jellz (jealous)
liq (liquor)
merch (merchandise)
milli (million)
obvi (obvious or obviously)
perf (perfect)
presh (precious)
pregs (pregnant)probs (probably)
Are there any that they should add to the list? Let us know now in the comments.
Image: William Perugini / Shutterstock
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here are the new word abbreviations spread by people on Twitter