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How does Twitter help words become shortened versions of themselves? Dartmouth researchers mined 180 million tweets from 900,000 users to understand the use of clipped words—think “awk” for “awkward,” or “defs” for “definite”— reports NPR.

Sravana Reddy, a research associate in the department of computer science and the department of linguistics and cognitive sciences, and her team discovered that people aren’t simply clipping words to fit Twitter’s 140-character limit, NPR writes. In fact, says NPR, the “average length of the tweets containing clipped words ranged from 80 to 90 characters, meaning that people were specifically choosing to use these shortenings.”

The team also discovered that clipping is most popular in California. “It might have originated in that area and spread over because of Hollywood and TV,” Reddy tells NPR.

Read the full story, published 1/17/14 by NPR.