Love is in the air, or at least it is on our TV screens since according to a new study by Preply, the word ‘love’ is used on average 116 times per hour on TV.
Taking into account some of the biggest shows from 2022, the team has studied scripts of 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 are 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)
Placing above love and earning first place was ‘know’, which was said a total of 1,416 times.
The second-most commonly used word was ‘like’, which had a total of 1,080 uses across each show analyzed. Per hour, the word was used a staggering 360 times – but only 46 in the period drama, ‘Bridgerton’, which could pertain to the 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. However, ‘wrong’ 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.