Have you ever guessed why people or even yourself type in longer words than its standard spelling? For example, words like 'heeeey,' 'yeees,' 'duuuude' or 'goooaaaalllll' have been the usual words we see online. In fact, a study found that most of the tweets online have stretched words. Here's why people are doing it and, most probably, will always do it.
YEEESSSS! Why do you type like that? Here's the answer
Daily Mail UK reported that most of the people now use uncommon phrasing of words and sentences with longer letters online.
Researchers at the University of Vermont Burlington studied and collected 100 billion tweets generated between Sept. 2008 and Dec. 2016, to identify similarities and uncommon patterns in how people type online.
It turns out that a huge number of tweets sent on this period have been stretching each of their letters per word online.
"We were doing something a bit silly and playful, and that's part of science. You never know what you might find," said Peter Dodds, a professor at the University of Vermont's department of mathematics and statistics.
Another unfamiliar thing about this practice is that people only write words this way online, but rare in formal writing.
The popularity of stretching words has been in line with how people want to convey emotions, even behind screens.
"While most of our online activity is not broadcast publicly, the things we do choose to share are important and worthy of careful enumeration," said study co-author Chris Danforth, a professor at the University of Vermont's Department of Mathematics & Statistics, told MailOnline. "When we want to emphasize our emotions, the visual effect of stretching words can be dramatic."
Words like 'suuuure' convey sarcasm, 'duuuuude' means frustration, 'yeeess' sounds excitement, 'nooooooo' conveys real disappointment, 'heeellppp' means increased desperation, when someone flirts they use words like 'heeeeyyy', and 'aarrrggghh' conveys immense pain.
Two kinds of stretchable words
One thing that was also significantly mentioned in the study is the variety of different words being stretched out online.
Interestingly, there are two kinds of characteristics of stretchable words: balance and stretch. Balance words are when someone stretches a word by repeating it based on the elongation of the word.
For example, the word 'hahahaha,' which has a high degree of balance, are words that have repeated letters that measure equally.
At the same time, the word 'goooooooaaal' is also categorized under less balanced since the letter 'o' is repeated more than usual or compared to other letters.
Stretch, however, is when a word can be modified as long as you wanted it to be. For example, the word 'ha' in 'hahahaha' have a high degree of a stretch since people can lengthen it as long as they can.
However, non-stretchable words like 'infinity' can just be repeated with one letter such as 'infinityyy.'
"It would be interesting to study these things further, such as the distinction between visual and phonetic stretching or how the patterns of stretching have changed over time or differ across geographic regions," said the study.
