Map reveals Pennsylvania's favorite curse word

By collecting almost 1 billion tweets for a year, researchers were able to map which states use which curse words the most.

Diansheng Guo at Univeristy of South Carolina collected the tweets from October 2013 until November 2014, amassing almost 9 billion words in total. Turns out the profane word Pennsylvania uses the most is "a--hole."

Jack Grieve, a forensic linguistics professor at Aston University in England, explains the methodology for the curse maps, saying, "For any word, we measure its relative frequency in each county by dividing the total number of occurrences of that word in that county by the total number of words in that county."

Then, Grieve and colleagues used geotagged data ("a Getis-Ord Gi local spatial autocorrelation analysis") to create the map identifying the frequency with which Twitter users in each county in each state use a certain profane word.

"A--hole" was the only curse word Pennsylvania scored highly for with near entirety, followed by "f---."

[Gawker]