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US States And Cities With The Biggest Vocabulary, Mapped | Digg


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    A study by Ghent University found that the average English-speaking American will know at least 42,000 words by adulthood. But which places in the US have the biggest vocabulary?

    Letter Solver analyzed millions of geotagged English-language tweets, and condensed the data into a sample of 1,000 common words. Crunching the numbers on how many unique words were used by each city per 1,000, they were able to come up with a map of the most verbose, highfalutin places in America.

    So if you're planning on facing people in "Scrabble" in all 50 states, maybe stay away from a few key places, or you might end up on a losing streak.

    Key Findings:

    • Hawaii is the state with the biggest vocabulary, which makes sense considering it's a place where you could conceivably find the most languages spoken fluently. Hawaiian, English, Spanish, Japanese, the list goes on. Because of its unique location on Earth, in between Asia and the west coast of the US, and because its a hot spot for tourism, Hawaiians have the broadest range of vocab compared to the other 49 states.

    • The cities with the biggest vocabulary happen to be three of the most populated and diverse in the western hemisphere: San Francisco, New York and Washington DC. The more people you have certainly helps, as the list of most unique words used includes highly populated places like San Jose, Irvine, Boston and Seattle.

    • Baltimore, Maryland, gets the dubious honor of being the city with the smallest lexicon. We could speculate as to why this is, but we have a feeling that gets into precarious territory since it involves the demographics of Baltimore, and that leads directly to a conversation about classism, racism and all sorts of messy, thorny issues like education and David Simon's Twitter account.


    Via LetterSolver.

    Sources


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