Online swearing and curse words on Twitter seem to have surpassed the amount said in real life, researchers have found.
A major analysis of 51 million English language tweets revealed that one in 13 tweets contain a curse, UK MailOnline reported.
Researchers were also able to rank the most popular words, finding f**k to be the most popular - with the top seven accounting for over 90% of offensive tweets.
"It's a sizable fraction of the words we use," Wenbo Wang, a PhD researcher at Wright State University who led the study, told Fastco. "On average, one tweet out of 13 tweets will contain at least one cursing word."
Wang continued, "Because of social media, people don't see each other. They can say things they wouldn't say in the physical world."
From 14 million distinct user accounts, a random one-month sample of 51 million English-language tweets were examined by the team at Wright State University, according to UK MailOnline.
They found that we curse more on Twitter than in real life, but tend to use only a few words.
"We found that the curse words occurred at the rate of 1.15 percent on Twitter, and 7.73 percent of all the tweets in our dataset contained curse words," the team wrote in their paper, which was presented this week at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing.
"We also found that seven most frequently used curse words accounted for more than 90% of all the cursing occurrences."
The team said the idea was formed because they wanted to find out if people cursed more on Twitter, UK MailOnline reported.
"Cursing is not uncommon during conversations in the physical world: 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent of all the words we speak are curse words, given that 1 percent of all the words are first-person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us, our)," the researchers wrote.
They added, "On social media, people can instantly chat with friends without face-to-face interaction, usually in a more public fashion and broadly disseminated through highly connected social network."
Identifying five different emotions from tweets - anger, joy, sadness, love, and thankfulness, they also classified the cursing.
"Based on the classification results, we found that cursing on Twitter was most closely associated with two negative emotions: sadness and anger," the researchers said. "However, curse words could also be used to emphasize positive emotions such as joy or love."
Other insights in the paper involved timing, location, gender, and level of influence of the tweeters.
People curse more and more as the day passes, reaching a peak at 12 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. before bedtime, and Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays contain the most curse words relative to tweet volume, according to UK MailOnline.
However, when talking directly to a user, the team found that users swore less.
"Our study of the relation between cursing and message types suggests that users perform self-censorship when they talk directly to other users," the team said. "We find that users do curse more in relaxed environments, but the differences across different environments are very small, partly due to the fact that Twitter messages are posted in virtual digital world."
The team continued, "They also found men tended to swear more. Men curse more than women, men overuse some curse words different from what women use and vice versa, and both men and women are more likely to curse in the same-gender contexts."
