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President Donald Trump speaks using less complex words than any other modern president, a new analysis examining speech patterns claims.
Factba.se assessed the first 30,000 words spoken by each president while in office that it had in its database, from news conferences, interviews and other contexts, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale as well as more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels.
Social media posts were not included.
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The results showed that the vocabulary Trump uses when he speaks is around the fourth-grade level, the least complex among the past 15 U.S. presidents. (At the other extreme is Iowan Herbert Hoover.)
"By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring 'off-script' words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker," Factba.se co-founder and CEO Bill Fischling wrote in the analysis.
The words were processed through a number of lexicological analyses other than the Flesch-Kincaid, and results were the same: Trump ranked as the simplest-speaking.
"The gap between Trump and the next closest president ... is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap," Fischling wrote.
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At the top, however, was Hoover, who came in around 11th grade.
Hoover served as the 31st U.S. President during the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933. He was born Aug. 10, 1874 in West Branch, where he and his wife are buried. Hoover is the only president to be born in Iowa.
You can learn more about Hoover's life and presidency here.
The frame of Fischling's analysis was Trump's tweets over the weekend saying that he is a "stable genius." But the blog post said vocabulary isn't a useful proxy for intelligence.
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