Searching the internet for words like cheeeeeeeese (
try
it!) gives very varying results depending on the number of extra
e:s (or other extra letters in whatever word). This can be shown in a
so-called
cheese
histogram, a few examples of which are shown below; the x-axis
represents the number of the repetitive letter, and the y-axis the
number of hits from a particular search engine.
|
|
"A picture is worth a thousand words, but a spectrum is worth a
thousand pictures"
|
|
|
|
|
|
A
cheese
absorption
is defined as a sharp decrease in the number of hits at a particular
number of extra letters. It is so called because it looks a
little bit like an absorption line in an astronomical spectrum
(although arguably more box-like) and because the phenomenon was
discovered with the word "cheese".
On this page are some examples of particularly long spellings with
absorption
lines: apart from cheeeese, we show the words hellooo, noooo and
booooring
here. Note that the absorption lines occur at very different numbers of
extra vowels, but that they are all characterized by a decrease by
approximately one order of magnitude. For more information, be sure to
check out our
science page.
|
It has recently been shown that other search sites, like yahoo, do not suffer
from cheese absorptions. Here is an example: |
|
 |
