‘Like’ is definitely a common word, but did you know that it’s the second most used word on TV? No seriously, the word is used on average 360 times per hour on television.
As part of their new study, the team at Preply have trawled through the boxes of TV boxsets to find out which are the most commonly used words on screen.
Taking into account some of the biggest shows from 2022, the team have studied scripts from varying genres, to break down the frequency of word usage in each one. Ranking each word out of a usage score of 15,780, the averages were revealed…
See how the most commonly used words stacked up below!
- Know – 1416 (472 average uses per hour)
- Like – 1080 (360 average uses per hour)
- Us – 484 (161 average uses per hour)
- Back – 444 (148 average uses per hour)
- Sorry – 433 (144 average uses per hour)
- Tell – 427 (142 average uses per hour)
- Love – 348 (116 average uses per hour)
- F*** – 344 (115 average uses per hour)
- Mean – 336 (112 average uses per hour)
- Please – 331 (110 average uses per hour)
Above ‘like’, we have ‘know’, which is used a total of 1,416 times – and on average 472 times – throughout a wide selection of programmes.
As for ‘like’, this word has 1,080 uses across each show analysed. Per hour, the word was used a staggering 360 times – but only 46 in period drama, ‘Bridgerton’, which could pertain to more archaic language being used in the script.
The word ‘wrong’ was only used an average of 129 times throughout all of the shows researched, with 43 uses per hour. It was used only twice in the time period studied during ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, and twice again in ‘Emily in Paris’.
The top four most-used categories were ‘friendship’ and ‘love’, highlighting that despite some of the dramatic and occasionally distressing plots we see on our screens, positivity prevails.
The team also broke down the data for the most loving words used on TV, as well as the angriest words, friendliest words and most offensive words.
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