Twitter's loved and hated words (WOTY: thot, bae, ratchet)

[Hugo]

@LOVIHATIBOT

In a similar vein to @favibot, I made @lovihatibot. It's been running a month now and has found 3,698 loved words and 4,605 hated words.

It searches Twitter for the phrases "I love the word [X]" and "I hate the word [X]", extracts X and adds it to Wordnik lists. It then tweets out the words it finds.

http://twitter.com/lovihatibot
http://www.wordnik.com/lists/twitter-loves
http://www.wordnik.com/lists/twitter-hates
https://github.com/hugovk/word-tools

Along with the usual swear words, two of the most popular words are words I've never heard before: "thot" and "bae". They're the top two hated words, and 4th and 5th loved words. (An honourable mention to "ratchet", another new one to me and on both lists.)

I'll nominate them as words of the year.

Here's word clouds:

Loved: https://twitter.com/lovihatibot/status/406343752622415872/photo/1/large
Hated: https://twitter.com/lovihatibot/status/406344530267353089/photo/1/large

Loved words contains 3,698 words and 2,083 unique words. The top 20 words are:
1. cunt (122)
2. fuck (107)
3. thot (58)
4. bitch (58)
5. bae (45)
6. woman (32)
7. baby (30)
8. babe (30)
9. sassy (30)
10. rad (27)
11. lovely (23)
12. moist (23)
13. twat (23)
14. ratchet (21)
15. beautiful (16)
16. faggot (16)
17. hella (15)
18. no (14)
19. love (14)
20. darling (14)


Hated words contains 4,605 words and 1,651 unique words. The top 20 words are:
1. thot (272)
2. bae (244)
3. no (117)
4. moist (114)
5. homophobia (111)
6. swag (72)
7. selfie (65)
8. sorry (54)
9. cunt (53)
10. excuse (53)
11. pussy (53)
12. sexy (45)
13. panties (42)
14. love (35)
15. soon (32)
16. babe (32)
17. ratchet (30)
18. lol (30)
19. ma (29)
20. bye (27)

Here's examples in real life, you can see it's used lots on Twitter by how often "X new results" is updated:
http://twitter.com/search?q=thot
http://twitter.com/search?q=bae
http://twitter.com/search?q=bae%20thot
http://www.courant.com/community/manchester/hc-manchester-bullying-arrest-1128-20131127,0,4589514.story
http://www.vladtv.com/blog/175497/50-cent-alerts-mayweather-about-his-girl-getting-with-ray-j/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roAbuIyzPmI#t=10

---

THOT

Ignoring two 2006s which are a different meaning, the highest voted Urban Dictionary definition is the earliest:

[Begin]
A Thot is a hoe. Plural: Thotties
Marquan: Yo thats my main girl
Deshaun: She yo main girl but she my main thot
hoe slut whore bitch bop
by Trillllll July 26, 2012
3474 up, 1226 down
[End]

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=thot

Other definitions explain it's an abbreviation for "that hoe over there" (or similar).

---

BAE

New to me, but older than "thot" according to Urban Dictionary. Top definition:

[Begin]
A lover or significant other
Bae come here so I can kiss you.
boo lover significant other boyfriend girlfriend
by bubbless August 11, 2006
[End]

Another definition explains it's an abbreviation of "babe":

[Begin]
Word used by ghetto people to address their significant other because they have found themselves too lazy to pronounce the entire word "babe".
[End]

Similarly in the earliest from 2003:

[Begin]
A bastardization of the term 'babe' as pronounced typically in a Vietnamese accent.
[End]

---

Rap Genius's Rap Stats shows "thot" from 2010 and "bae" from 2005:

http://rapgenius.com/rapstats?q=thot%2Cbae

They have 132 songs with "thot" and 73 with "bae".

(Does anyone know if you can search Rap Genius by date, like you can go from a Google Ngram to Google Books? They obviously have the metadata to create the Rap Stats charts, but I can't find any advanced search, and individual lyrics pages are missing years meaning you need to check an external source.)

---

Hugo

PS There's a spambot out there that's messing with my wordbot. The spambot replies to people with "I love the word douchebag." and a spam image, but I've selectively filtered it out of my results otherwise "douchebag" would be number 1 with 1,248 results instead of at 30 with 11!

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org