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Is thanks a valid term of gratitude

“thanks”
Valid gratitude term
Confidence: High Checked on July 3, 2026

Summary

“Thanks” is an English word that denotes an expression of gratitude, defined by reputable dictionaries as words or actions showing thankfulness. Studies confirm it is commonly used in English, though the frequency of saying thank you differs across cultures and languages. It is a standard, recognized polite expression.

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Sources 60 searched

sciencedirect.com
psychologicalscience.org
  • People Underestimate the Power of Saying 'Thanks'

    “I think this research adds to our understanding of people’s daily lives and speaks to simple ways in which they can be improved,” says Kumar, now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The authors suggest some reasons that individuals might undervalue gratitude. First, expressers might assume that a recipient already knows they’re appreciative, so they underestimate the recipient’s surprise at being genuinely thanked. Second, actors tend to evaluate themselves in terms of competence, so they may worry about how they express gratitude.

theguardian.com
  • People rarely say thank you when others help them out, scientists say | Science | The Guardian

    Thank yous appeared most in English (14.5%) and Italian (13.5%), but far less in Polish (2%) and Siwu (0.8%). The Chachi speakers of Cha’palaa, in common with the horse-mounted nomadic Dothraki in Game of Thrones, have no word for “thank you”. It is not unusual for languages to lack the phrase, the scientists said. “This doesn’t mean that people are universally rude, nor that speakers of English are less rude than speakers of other languages,” said Nick Enfield, a lead researcher on the study at the University of Sydney. “We should not conflate the feeling of gratitude with the act of expressing it.” · What the study leaves open is why people say thank you on the rare occasions they do.

guides.libraries.psu.edu
corpora.lancs.ac.uk
  • Statistics in corpus linguistics

    Corpora are an unparalleled source of quantitative data for linguists. So corpus linguists often test or summarise their quantitative findings through statistics. Some other areas of linguistics also frequently appeal to statistical notions and tests. Psycholinguistic experiments, grammatical elicitation tests and survey-based investigations, for example, all commonly involve statistical tests of some sort. However, frequency ...

dictionary.cambridge.org
en.wikipedia.org
  • Thank you - Wikipedia

    It has generally been observed that "parents train their kids to say 'thank you' whether they feel thankful or not", and has specifically been noted that withholding food from children in order to elicit politeness "may teach children that the words 'please' and 'thank you' are tokens they ...

spsp.org
  • Does Saying “Thanks A Lot!” Make You Look Less Than? | SPSP

    I’m incredibly grateful.” In this study—as well as in six others—people thought thankers who expressed more effusive gratitude had relatively lower status and power compared to the person who provided them help. They did not make this assumption about thankers who expressed gratitude more simply.

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