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
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.
