Most American and British words

For WaPo’s Department of Data, Andrew Van Dam goes looking for American and British words, finding the most statistical action in spoken words over written.

We used our new measure to focus our book-word analysis on those words that people say out loud with at least some regularity. And with every crank of the out-loud-ness dial, we watch the two dialects get less and less similar, and more and more hilarious.

We start with relatively harmless terms. Footballers and whingeing stand out on one side, and statewide and nonfat stand out on the other. But it escalates quickly. British rises from manky and dodgy to shagging to knobhead and bruv. American goes from hoagie and doggone to homegirl and loogie to — at the slangiest echelons of the language — cornhole and bruh.

In the above, more British is on the left and more American is on the right, based on the OpenSubtitles dataset from Opus.

Then there’s the swear words.