Isabel Kloumann and a group of mathematicians at the University of Vermont published a paper in 2012 on positivity in the English language. They took just over 10,000 of the most frequent English words from a variety of sources (Twitter, Google Books, The New York Times, and music lyrics) and had people rate them on a 9 point scale from least happy to most happy, collecting 50 independent ratings per word. In the resulting dataset, available here, "laughter" comes in at number 1 in perceived happiness, and "terrorist" comes last.
So what are the happiest words in English? They might be nice to hear. But it turns out that positivity heaped on positivity becomes, like sugar or a giant clown smile, sickening after a point. To illustrate this problem, here are the top 20 words: laughter, happiness, love, happy, laughed, laugh, laughing, excellent, laughs, joy, successful, win, rainbow, smile, won, pleasure, smiled, rainbows, winning.
As you go down the list in a binge of positive word reading, so many of the positive words start to sound crass (rich, diamonds, glory), treacly (butterflies, cupcakes, friends), or too obvious (positive, great, wonderful). The following 25 words, shown alongside their rankings, struck me as anchors of true quiet positivity in a sea of toothy grins:
159 -- easier
172 -- interesting
205 -- honest
211 -- forests
234 -- Saturday
239 -- dinner
290 -- comfortable
320 -- gently
344 -- fresh
371 -- pal
375 -- warmth
433 -- rest
449 -- welcome
491 -- dearest
504 -- useful
548 -- cherry
558 -- safe
584 -- better
665 -- piano
721 -- silk
741 -- relief
878 -- rhyme
892 -- hi
947 -- agree
969 -- water
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