What is Your City's Reading Level Based on 100,000 Tweets?
We know that Cambridge is Britain's best city for business and London is the best for tourism and entertainment, but which city is Britain's smartest?
Now, while 'smartest' is quite difficult to define, average reading level, or a person's comprehension abilities, is not.
Turning to Twitter, we've used a computer algorithm to score tweets based on spelling, grammar and word choice.
Studying each city and county right across the UK, we have examined the reading levels of over 100,000 Twitter messages posted by users within the boundaries of each area.
What exactly did we look at?
Flesch Reading Ease
BONUS: Find out which celebrity has the highest reading level at the bottom of this article
Average Reading Level Analysis - Cities
The city with the highest reading is...
As the birthplace of modern English, it is no surprise that Leicester had the highest average reading level in our analysis. Finishing with a score of 69.7 out of 100, the tweeters of Leicester scored particularly high in their spelling abilities.
The city with the lowest reading level is…
As the birthplace of British novelist Roald Dahl and revered Welsh journalist Jon Ronson, you would have expected Cardiff to perform highly in our analysis.
Unfortunately, the Welsh capital scored the lowest of the 22 cities we analysed - with a 32 out of 100. Yet really, this shouldn't be of any surprise when you consider English is not the official language of the city.
Average Reading Level Analysis - Counties
The county with the highest reading level is...
Best known for its magnificent Cathedral and renowned Royal Worcester Porcelain, Worcestershire can now also claim to have the highest reading level out of all the home counties. Scoring a 55.7 out of 100, Worcestershire scored highly in the Flesch Reading Ease analysis.
The county with the lowest reading level is...
Home to the 2017 capital of culture in Hull, East Yorkshire is a homely county found on the North East coast of England.
Unfortunately, we also found that they have the lowest average reading level. Scoring a 38.6 out of 100, the county was 0.6 points from moving out of the bottom three.
Average Reading Level Analysis - Celebrities
The celebrity with the highest reading level is…
If going to Harvard, building a billion dollar company and inventing a cure for Malaria wasn't quite enough, Bill Gates can now claim to have the highest average reading level out of the top 100 celebrities on Twitter. Well done Bill!
Surprisingly, the highest scoring Brit was Jimmy Carr. Funny.
The celebrity with the lowest reading level is…
Famous for the lyrical masterpiece Black and Yellow, the heartfelt See You Again and the Suicide Squad favourite Sucker for Pain, Wiz Khalifa finished last in our analysis.
Scoring 53 out of 100, he finished just behind the likes of Lil Wayne and Kim Kardashian West.
Statistics that feature in this article have been collated using Twitter. By performing an average reading level test on 100,000 tweets in each county/city, we have given each city and county a percentage rating out of 100.
For each category we have ranked the cities/counties from 1-22 (cities) and 1-48 (counties) based on how they performed in each category.
Access the raw data here.
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