What comes with boobs and tits?

I considered checking the collocations for boobs and tits in my post yesterday, but I thought that would be unnecessary padding. However, the topic has come up in the comments, so I can’t resist checking to see what words occur most often near the words in question.

To start with, instead of limiting to novels by authors with names I can check, I checked the whole Corpus of Contemporary American English. I checked for words that occur one or two places before or after each word (two places after because it could be “her boobs were truculent” and I wouldn’t want to miss that truculent; two places because sometimes there are two adjectives before). This doesn’t give any distribution by sex of author or by genre, but it gives a general feel for it.

For breasts, the most common collocates were her (3586), my (831), chicken (708) (remember, this includes all genres, not just novels), between (262), small (201), against (169), large (150), big (142), skinless (132) (I hope you realize this one is from recipes), full (127), and bare (102).

For tits, the most common collocates were her (121), big (58), my (57), great (33) (this could include birds), ! (29) (yes, they count exclamation marks), ass (21), tits (12) (yes, as in “tits, tits, tits!”), nice (11), fake (10), and blue (10) (this is for the ornithologists, not for sci-fi fans).

For boobs, the most common collocates were her (107), my (99), your (68), big (43), bigger (19), fake (15), huge (8), and having (8).

Then I turned to my data from the fiction books. The results give me the 10 words before and 10 words after each hit. I did a quick count of hits for each of several text strings in the results. This is within 10 words now, not within 2, but it’s a smaller set of results to work with. I didn’t do a proper collocation search, just a count of specific text strings. Still, the results have some interest. I’ve calculated percentages for them so you have a sense of the actual proportions.

For breasts, here’s what I found:

hands	108	7.8%
small	96	6.9%
nipples	81	5.8%
ass	72	5.2%
large	67	4.8%
bare	54	3.9%
soft	49	3.5%
big	46	3.3%
naked	39	2.8%
nice	20	1.4%
bodice	14	1.0%
chicken	11	0.8%
ripe	11	0.8%
fake	2	0.1%

For tits, here’s what I found:

big	32	19.0%
ass	15	8.9%
small	8	4.8%
nice	3	1.8%
nipples	2	1.2%
hands	2	1.2%
fake	2	1.2%
bare	1	0.6%
chicken	1	0.6%
naked	1	0.6%
soft	1	0.6%

For boobs, here’s what I found:

big	17	11.8%
ass	9	6.3%
large	4	2.8%
fake	4	2.8%
bare	3	2.1%
small	3	2.1%
soft	1	0.7%
nipples	1	0.7%
nice	1	0.7%

Remember, these are occurrences within 10 words of the hit, not within 2 words. So we see, among other things, that big shows up very often near tits, about half as often near boobs (though it’s still the most common of the bunch there too), and not much near breasts. Small is common with breasts and tits but not so much with boobs. Hands are not seen often near tits or boobs but quite often near breasts. Ass shows up near tits about 9% of the time, near boobs about 6%, and near breasts about 5%. And boobs are most likely of the three to have fake, but the sample size is too small for that to be significant. There were also 3–4% of bare and naked near breasts, but only one of each near tits; there were 3 bare near boobs but no naked at all.

And yes, there is one instance of chicken near tits. It is from Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes, and the sentence in question is “Relics that held as much hope of future service as tits on a chicken.” (I would just like to say that chicken breasts have done me great service many times in my life. But, as they do not have nipples, I suppose they don’t count as tits.)

This is data, and make of it what you will. A lot more research, including on other corpora, can be done (pay me). My next project on this will be to dig into the cultural history of boobs versus tits and how it happens that boobs is apparently a mainly feminine-speaker usage. There’s a clear apparent phonaesthetic angle (tits sounds like tips and would seem to connote pointiness and nipples, whereas boobs seems to convey roundness and pendulousness), but I’m sure there’s more than just that to be uncovered.

(And no, I have not been keyword stuffing to troll for search results. How dare you suggest such a thing.)