Feeling scute with your on fleek eyebrows or with your new balayage? Or are you rekt and baeless?

The English language is forever in flux, as new words are born and old ones die. But where do these terms come from and what determines whether they survive?

Charting linguistic change was once a painstakingly slow task, but a new analysis of nearly one billion Tweets – presented on 17 April at the Evolang International Conference on Language Evolution in Torun, Poland – now offers us an unprecedented glimpse of this process in action.

According to this new research, most of the more recent coinages will have originated in one of five distinct hotspots that are driving American English through continual change.

Candids and gainz

Compared to historical linguistic corpuses, the data available online is staggering. More than 20% of Americans were using Twitter at the time of the study – and each Tweet is timestamped and geocoded, offering precise information on the time and place that particular terms entered conversations.

The researcher behind the study, Jack Grieve at the University of Birmingham, UK, analysed more than 980 million Tweets in total – consisting of 8.9 billion words – posted between October 2013 and November 2014, and spanning 3,075 of the 3,108 US counties.

From this huge dataset, Grieve first identified any terms that were rare at the beginning of the study (occurring less than once per billion words in the last quarter of 2013) but which had then steadily risen in popularity over the course of the following year. He then filtered the subsequent list for proper nouns (such as Timehop) and those appearing in commercial adverts, and he also removed any words that were already in Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Acronyms, however, were included.