It's, like, verbal filler

The term verbal filler (or tic) refers to the usage of spoken words that serve largely as filler. "Like" is a prime offender - for example, "It's, like, not good to enter without asking". The prevalence of spoken-word podcasts gives us an abundance of source material in which to hear verbal filler. The goal of this web experiment is to analyze usage of the filler word "like" in several well-known podcasts.

What's the approach?

We transcribed several well-known podcast episodes into text, starting with the Slate Culture Gabfest, in which we happened to observe a high rate of 'like' filler. We then chose several other popular podcast episodes. This web experiment parses each transcript and presents various insights revolving around usage of the word 'like' such as: 'like' counts, common preceding and following words, and 'like' spacing.

Results

These visualizations give us a decent idea of how 'like' is used in these episodes, and how the episodes compare to each other. However, we don't attempt to cull false positives (e.g., non-filler/legit usages such as in similes), our sample size is small, and we don't really have a 'control episode'. But hey, this was, like, just for fun!