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This Word Appears in More Reddit Post Titles Than Any Other

A Reddit user scraped data from every submission that got at least 1,000 upvotes and found Trump topped the list of most-used words for three years running
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Sometimes a simple data visualization captures just how single-minded our collective conscious has become. Take this chart showing the most popular words used in the title of Reddit posts in 2016, 2017, and 2018:

Chart of top words used in Reddit post titles

Source: Reddit

As you probably noticed, “Trump” tops the list three years running, beating out common Reddit stylizations like “TIL” and “IRL.” “Trump” was used even more often than “people,” “I’m,” or (heavy sigh) “love.”

Reddit user turnip_cakes shared the chart on the Data Is Beautiful subreddit Friday, explaining that they used R—a programming language—to scrape the data and collect the titles of every Reddit post submission with at least 1,000 upvotes from 2016 through September of this year.

After that, they exempted all of the common language words like “and,” “the,” and “that.” They then calculated a percentage based on the total number of times the word occurred divided by the total number of all words in order to generate the chart above.

As you can see, the percentages are relatively tiny—all less than 1 percent—but their relative occurrence still shows just how distracted we’ve been with President Donald Trump in the time since he started his campaign. And even with these tiny percentages, the amount of Trump posts stands out. In 2017, Trump accounted for 0.85 percent of title words. Compare that to the next highest term, “time,” which only accounted for 0.37 percent of words.

It might be time for us to all get a new obsession.