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Words known better by males than females, and vice versa
- LouisSayers 5y agoInteresting that many people here know many of the words. I knew 10 of the male ones and zero of the female... I'm from New Zealand, it'd be interesting to do this same experiment in NZ / Aus to see what the percentages are. I suspect that the average NZ vocabulary is quite low...
- quus 5y agoI did not know “strafe” which I guess a lot of guys do? “Gauss” I just thought of the mathematician; forgot it was a science thing. I’m not at all sure what to make of where “shemale” ranks
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago"Shemale" is such a great punchline. I was reading these thinking "Oh fuck, I know all the male words and none of the female ones, I'll never pass as a woman with a vocabulary like this". At the bottom, "Shemale". Tada! That's why I know all the male words! I'm a sh**ale!
- Semaphor 5y agoI think strafing has something to do with combat aircraft (a strafing run, probably fly by shooting?), but where I know it from, is early shooters (haven’t played any in over a decade, not sure if that word is still used), strafing was moving sideways. edit: my guess for the actual meaning was close-ish: > Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons > The word is an adaptation of German strafen, to punish, specifically from the humorous adaptation of the German anti-British slogan Gott strafe England (May God punish England), dating back to World War I. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing And I might as well post the gaming page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing_(video_games) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing_(video_games)
- vlozko 5y agoStrafe a pretty commonly used word when dealing with first/third person shooter video games. Probably self explanatory why more guys know it.
- thelopa 5y agoRe “shemale”: I wonder what other slurs they included in the data set. I have a hard time believing “shemale” is the only slur with gender polarization.
- Hjfrf 5y agoStrafe in shooter games is a movement relative to the direction you're facing without turning. So on a standard two-stick controller layout your left stick is strafe and your right is aim. I expect more people have played halo than flown planes.
- jdavis703 5y agoSo men know words related to male dominated areas like physics, chemistry, electricity, crime and war. Women know words related to female dominated areas like fashion, grooming and women’s health. I hate to say it, but water is wet.
- rexpop 5y agoWhat's shocking is that these areas are still gender-dominated. Why should they be?
- fleddr 5y agoWhy should they not be? Men and women have widely different interests. Let it be.
- spartanatreyu 5y agoDo men and women actually have different interests? Or have we all just been shoehorned into interests because someone decreed: "Let it be"?
- Manuel_D 5y agoMuch of the research on the topic indicates the former. Gender bifurcation in jobs is even more pronounced in more egalitarian countries [1]. Babies exhibit different gender preferences for toys at ages less than a year old [2] [3]. 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... 2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.h... 3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7
- mukesh610 5y agoWhy is it "shocking"? Why are you saying "gender-dominated" like it's a bad thing? Which areas are "gender-dominated" that you are upset about?
- culi 5y agoI guess that's an interesting way to point out that the domain most dominated by women over men is fashion and the domain most dominated by men over women is engineering (or porn in the case of "shemale"?)
- BuildTheRobots 5y agoInteresting numbers, but it'd be vastly improved by being able to filter for age ranges too. Gauss and Degauss are the two that jumped out at me. I'd be curious to know how many people of either gender have encountered it, if they're young enough to have never lived with CRT TVs.
- burnished 5y agoYou can also encounter those words in a high school or college physics course, which is where I associate them.
- armadsen 5y agoSame, although I also know degauss as it relates to CRTs. "Gaussian blur" -- almost always mispronounced -- is also relatively commonly encountered by anyone doing image or video editing. Though of course, that's a completely different term described by the same person's name.
- wnoise 5y agoHow is it pronounced, and how do you think it should be pronounced?
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoWeird choice of vocabulary to study - fabric and fashion words stressed for women, and techno-babble for men. Was the vocabulary completely random, or was this result forced by anticipating the outcome?
- function_seven 5y agoRandom. The results shown here are the words with the largest disparity between the sexes. The total list was almost 62,000 words. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
- JeremyNT 5y agoThanks for the link. Here's a little bit of detail about their sample gathering, which I found interesting: The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/ http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their native language, what their age and gender were, which country they came from, and their level of education. For the present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56% were completed by female participants and 44% by male participants. The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that used by many online quizzes: Word test How many English words do you know? With this test you get a valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4 minutes and you help scientific research. Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went viral in some specific communities. Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it... but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 5y agoThe "male" words aren't technobabble though. They're just scientific language. The data certainly seems to very clearly represent the impact of the historical bias in education, entertainment, and the world in general to emphasise "science" as a pursuit for males and "craft" as a pursuit for girls.
- BlameKaneda 5y agoIt's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women. The fashion-related words (taffeta, chignon, espadrille, etc) being known more to women makes sense to me, but I'm not sure why the three Japanese words are more known to men.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI would think, given your username, that you would have a feeling that these male words are more 'badass'?
- HideousKojima 5y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure the gender ratio of "people who have seen Akira" is probably 10:1 male:female
- bryanrasmussen 5y agocome on, I made sure every girlfriend I ever had learned all about it shortly before breaking up with me!
- onion2k 5y agoIt's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women. Those three words in particular feature heavily in lots of video games and films. That could explain some of it.
- tzs 5y agoThe Yakuza were in a season 8 episode of The Simpsons in 1997. That would help make it a perfectly cromulent word for a lot of people.
- vmception 5y agojapanese cultural appreciation is heavily indexed on nerd culture and that's heavily men. just an additional audience to skew the metrics.
- hanoz 5y agoStrange. All the male words are perfectly commonplace, and all the female ones appear to be completely made up.
- Aspos 5y agoLet me guess... Such dataset could be used as a gender captcha.
- netsharc 5y agoThere's a comic strip I saw once about how to detect people pretending to be girls on online chats. Ask them "what do you think of [I can't remember the word]?" and if they go "Huh?" you know they're pretending to be a girl. The word was a word that meant decoration on windows, but I can't remember what it is...
- function_seven 5y agoThis is brilliant. Like that time the psychiatrist showed me endless silhouettes of my parents fighting, and kept asking me, "What do you see here?"
- ndm000 5y agoAt first I thought “all the female words must be in some other language”.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoIt does seem like the female words are more obviously foreign (specifically French) whereas the male words tend towards being more technical.
- djur 5y agoI'm seeing Greek, Latin, Japanese, German, and Danish just skimming the "male words", and plenty of the "female words" have been used in English for ages. I think that's more a familiarity effect.
- nathell 5y ago
- vorpalhex 5y agoNB is <0.1% of the US population. [1] So it skews the results basically not at all. [1] - https://weareher.com/what-percentage-of-the-us-population-is-non-binary/ https://weareher.com/what-percentage-of-the-us-population-is...
- not2b 5y agoMight be interesting to do a similar experiment by age: people in their 20s vs 40s vs 60s, say.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoMy late grandfather (would've been 90's) didn't know quite as many questions on Jeopardy! as Ken Jennings, but within a std deviation. When I was 20, if throwing out the sports deck, no one wanted to play Trivial Pursuit with me. Lol.
- alkonaut 5y agoWow I thought this was going to be a subtle effect but I literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones (I’m male). What’s even the context of those top words? The male ones are tech/games/science but the female? I think I half recognize jaquard as a fabric or fashion term.
- LinAGKar 5y agoSame here. Even for the few male words I didn't know exactly what they meant, I had a vague ideas about them, while the female ones are complete gibberish to me.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> What’s even the context of those top words? Without trying to google any of them, I think they're colors - I think chambray is a color, but I don't know what color it is.
- HideousKojima 5y agoI know that Jaquard is a kind of loom, but I only know that because of an interest in early industrial manufacturing tech
- vdnkh 5y agoSeems a bunch are around fabric/garments, I have a minor sewing hobby so I recognized some of them (male)
- brimble 5y ago
- JimDabell 5y agoAlong similar lines: names of colours, by gender: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- mcguire 5y ago"I weep for my gender."
- Hello71 5y agoIt's worth noting that, based on the paper, this is really "words known better by males (who complete free online quizzes) than by females (who complete free online quizzes)". This likely explains a significant amount of the fashion and video game words. For example, it seems unlikely to me that 60% of all US and UK women know the word "peplum", but reasonably plausible that US and UK women who complete free quizzes on the internet also spend more time browsing clothes on the internet than the average woman, and would therefore have more knowledge than the average woman about clothing terminology.
- hammock 5y agoYou don't have to buy clothes on the internet to know what a peplum or other clothing terms are. Most clothes are not bought online.
- rubylark 5y agoI'm going to disagree here. I'm a woman and I had the same results as every man replying here: I recognized all the science, game, and action terms and almost none of the fashion and textile ones. Never once when I have gone clothes or makeup shopping (always exclusively in person) have I encountered any of those terms, written or otherwise. I feel I might have been more familiar if I actually shopped online where these words might be displayed.
- handmodel 5y agoThis is very interesting! Would love to see a similar list but weight by the ratio of men who don't know versus women who don't know aka words that known by 90% of males and 80% of females (or visa versa). This is very interesting but not that surprised that many people don't know boson or servo or checksum or technical words.
- Scarblac 5y agoReminds me of Randall Munroe's hilarious report on his color survey, specifically the section on gender differences: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- zwieback 5y agoI'm a techno-nerd guy but knew all those fabrics most guys apparently don't. In my early 20s I was really into sewing, which is fascinating from an engineering perspective, highly recommend as a hobby to get you away from that monitor. Both the tools and processes used in sewing are really interesting.
- burnished 5y agoMost of the fabric words I have distinct memories, as an adult, of asking some one (usually a woman) what the word meant. Tulle in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out.
- AussieWog93 5y ago>Tulle in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out. Tulle is just orange bags, but not orange. The more you know.
- alanbernstein 5y agoI've gotten into sewing lately, and I know exactly what you mean about the engineering thing. I see sewing as a tool for designing and building custom "devices", like bag inserts, covers, etc. Do you know of any resources on sewing with that perspective? I have attended meetups, shopped at sewing boutiques, etc, but every person I have interacted with has just been interesting in garments, purses, and mending. Those are also interesting sewing topics! But the design skillset is a bit different, so I have a hard time getting help with my projects. On topic: Even with sewing as a hobby, I mostly just care about the engineering properties of materials. I knew very few of those words.
- zwieback 5y agoSorry, I don't have any good advice on resources for sewing non-garment devices. My first instinct would be to visit a fabric store for upholstery, neoprene or other outdoor fabrics. We have a fabulous store "The Rain Shed" nearby and they have patterns for things like you mention. It's a small store so they might answer the phone and be able to direct you. Here's their patterns link: https://www.therainshed.com/shop/Patterns--Kits.htm https://www.therainshed.com/shop/Patterns--Kits.htm Recently I read an interesting article about how smoke jumpers make their own kit (suits, bags, etc.): https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/content/news/Smokejumpers-use-sewing-to-help-them-fight-fires-548096591.html https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/content/news/Smokejumpers...
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
- advisedwang 5y agoSateen is not "phony/archaic/marketing". Its a totally legitimate word. Same with the other female-known words. I'm guessing you're male? Consider maybe your assessment is just part of the same gender-difference that results in this trend and not some objective underlying fact. (I don't want to get dragged into specific words, but certainly "bushido" is more archaic - it refers to a completely obsolete concept - and probably also phony - I've heard, but done no research on, that bushido only really exists as a rosy nostalgic view of a philosophy that was not really meaningful in the period it refers to).
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- notahacker 5y agoDoula is apparently a well established profession (I just learned that too!). A pessary is a medical device. "Shemale" is a colloquial, somewhat demeaning term used mostly in porn. I think it takes a rather special type of reasoning to assume that your knowledge of only the latter term is because the former words just aren't as important or useful...
- thelopa 5y ago“Somewhat demeaning”? Shemale is a slur.
- tomjakubowski 5y agoSorry, I don't want to misunderstand you: you're saying that the words better known by women are all phony, archaic, or marketing buzzwords; and the words identified by men are, contrariwise, all "real"? And they are phony or archaic because you, the smart one with a 75k vocabulary, don't personally know them? I can't believe someone could be so out of touch. Just as one counter example, "bushido" is totally archaic, has been irrelevant for 150 years since the Meiji restoration.
- tombert 5y agoDoes teraflop really count as a "word" if it has an acronym as part of it?
- Jtsummers 5y agoLaser, sonar, radar. Many, if not most, acronyms become words on their own at some point in English, especially if they enter the popular lexicon (leave their initial niche).
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoWhy not?
- djur 5y agoSure. "Laser" is a word too, and it's all acronym.
- ticklemyelmo 5y agoI'm more bothered by the omission of "s". The S in teraflops is not plural, it's part of the acronym. Your computer has 1 teraflop performance? One trillion floating point operations per _what_, then?
- olalonde 5y agoWould have been a good idea to throw in a word that doesn't exist to get a feel of how honest the answers were.
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoI'm skeptical half the men really know what piezoelectricity is, for example. Much less 75% being able to define boson. Maybe if the survey was at an engineering college.
- macintux 5y agoI suspect by “knowing the word” the implication is “familiar with/have encountered”, vs “being able to define correctly”.
- mcguire 5y agoThe study was literally picking words from non-words.
- wolf550e 5y ago"familiar with the word" doesn't mean "knows exact definition or the facts from the first paragraph of the wikipedia article". "a boson is a particle in physics" would be adequate definition, no need to actually know the details. Similarly, "piezoelectricity" is "the thing used in electric cigarette lighters / guitar pickups", no need for details. Women who know about fabrics don't necessarily know how they are manufactured.
- Symmetry 5y agoIt's fuzzy. I know exactly what a terraflop is including that most people use it to refer to 32 bit floating point operations by default but it can still mean other widths if specified. I thought a parsec was somewhere between 2 and 20 light years which is correct but still imprecise. I know damask is a fabric associated with dresses I've run into in books but have no idea what it looks like. So do I know 1, 2, or 3 of those words? It's fuzzy.
- 5y ago
- feintruled 5y agoThis startled me in the same way as a really excellent magic trick. You are convinced it's not going to catch you out, but then it does. I pride myself of having a wide vocabulary (or so I thought) and the premise sounded unlikely to me and yet I knew all the male words and didn't know the majority of the female words. What an eye opener!
- Yajirobe 5y agoMeh, the female ones don't seem to be English (at least a lot of them). The male ones are mostly international words.
- dymk 5y agoIf they’re not English, aren’t the female words also international words then too? Why’s that meh?
- eckmLJE 5y agothey're all english - peplum - late 17th century: via Latin from Greek peplos . - boucle - late 19th century: French, literally ‘buckled, curled’. - pessary - late Middle English: from late Latin pessarium, based on Greek pessos ‘oval stone’ (used in board games). - doula - 1960s: modern Greek, from Greek doulē ‘female slave’. - chignon - late 18th century: from French, originally ‘nape of the neck’, based on Latin catena ‘chain’. - tulle - early 19th century: from Tulle, a town in SW France, where it was first made. etc
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dimitrios1 5y agoInteresting, doule in modern greek just means work. Doula is one I would have never known had it not been for the pregnant women in my life.
- abrezas 5y ago
- voldacar 5y agoEven if you completely ignore the meaning and usage context of these words, there are some significant differences. The male words are sharper, rougher, more incisive. Azimuth, teraflop, neodymium, yakuza. The female words are rounder, smoother, less threatening. Verbena, doula, sateen, chenille. This is extremely interesting and not subtle at all
- throwamon 5y agoThis is an interesting observation, because the next question should be whether they know the word exists or they just "feel like" it exists (see sibling comment about the Bouba/Kiki effect).
- mLuby 5y agoAre you referring to how the words "feel" in your mind (≈ average of a cluster of associated words) or about the sounds in the words? Plosives (PaT), sibilants (Sassy/SHow) or glottals (CoCKpit) sound "sharper" to me than their voiced equivalents (BaD, Zoo/menaGerie, GooGle). Fricatives (FaVorite, baTH/baTHE) or nasals (NuMber) or taps (RoLe) tend to sound longer and softer.
- voldacar 5y agoIt's definitely both. It's not just the physical sounds I make when pronouncing them, but the mood and the overall "atmosphere" of the words that is different.
- jamespwilliams 5y agoReminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
- kelnos 5y agoA lot of the "female" words are fashion/style related. For a long time, France (and Italy) dominated the fashion world, so a lot of technical terms around fashion are French, which probably explains the distinction.
- 5y ago
- philipfweiss 5y agoI played a game of codenames, where I was the only guy on a team. I had an awesome clue- Flashbang: 4. None of the women on my team knew what it meant. Every guy in the room did. We lost the game, but it was a very interesting social experiment.
- hammock 5y agoLove that story. Makes me think playing Codenames in German, where all kinds of words are made by mashing other words together, would be a great advantage over playing in English.
- 7steps2much 5y agoWhen playing codenames in German you usually have the dictionary rule / Google rule. If you come up with a word and you aren't sure if it exists check if it is in the dictionary or if Google knows it. So no making up words like Mixerversicherungsfahrzeug
- arrrg 5y agoWell, this rather makes the game annoying to play with people who think they are so clever and start constructing completely new words no one before them ever used. Which the rules don’t allow, by the way. Sure, you can construct arbitrary new words in German. That works. However, that is certainly not the spirit of the game. Which the game does make abundantly clear in a quite long section of the rules. (I just got the game and its rules from our board game shelves, used the new OCR feature in iOS to copy and paste the relevant text into DeepL, cleaned up the translation and am now pasting it here with my own annotations in brackets. That was a cool experience.) Excerpt from the rules: Compound words German is notorious worldwide for its compound words. There are two ways to form such in German. „Tischdecke” (tablecloth) is one word. „Mehrzweck-Fräsvorsatz“ (multi purpose milling fixture) is in principle also a word, because the hyphen merely serves to make it easier to read. „Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz“ (beef labeling monitoring tasks transfer law) actually used to be a real (and awful) word, which probably would have been a little easier to read with a few hyphens. (We won't discuss the bad habit of breaking up compound words in German with – incorrect – spaces here). Strictly speaking, then, all such words can be valid clues, but only if they correspond to actual usage. It is easy in German to simply invent composites: „Tentakeltrabant“ (tentacle satellite) would theoretically be a great clue for „Oktopus” (octopus), „Mond“ (moon), and „Auto“ (car, because of the East German car „Trabant”), for example, but since it's only a word creation that you can't find in any dictionary, you can't use it. Prefixes This actually belongs to the previous rule, but should be mentioned explicitly: Simply turning a word into its opposite by putting a syllable like „kein-“, „nicht-“ or „un-“ (non-, un-) in front of it should only be allowed if this word is colloquially used. „Unlebendig“ (unalive) is therefore not a permitted clue for „Tod“ (death), „untot“ (undead) on the other hand would be permitted as a clue for „Skelett“ (skeleton).
- hirundo 5y agoDiverse results on a word comprehension test probably correlates with cultural diversity better than ethnicity does. It could be easier and more reliable to assemble a culturally diverse workforce via word comprehension clusters than by personal history. It's not hard to see how diversity measured like this can contribute to a team. It would tend to add people who have interests orthogonal to each other, broadening their joint perspective.
- mcguire 5y agoNote: "known" means recognized versus non-words.
- bccdee 5y agooh that's interesting — I assumed the bar was being able to loosely define the words.
- lkbm 5y agoAh, that's a good catch. I'd have trouble providing a precise definition for a lot of these, but I know them. ("servo" is some type of engine; "degauss" is a button I pressed on CRTs to make them go "boing"; a "doula" helps with birthing somehow in a non-medical capacity.)
- Kye 5y agoA servo is the movey bits that move the movey bits on the killbots.
- Handytinge 5y agoPretty sure a servo is where you get petrol and a sausage roll.
- vojvod 5y agoMost of the words I "know" from the female list are ones I've encountered in articles or novels that I didn't need to look up to get the gist of what I was reading. Same for a few on the male list, I've never needed to do anything with a thermistor or servo so I can only assume I recognise those words from SF.
- nickdothutton 5y agoI once used this phenomenon to build a tool to reliably determine whether a male or female had written a given text. I was surprised how accurate it was even when trained on a relatively small corpus. Used CRM114. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRM114_(program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRM114_(program)
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- NoGravitas 5y agoNow I need to find my moist, used, taffeta katana. I knew almost all of the "feee-male" words, though, despite being cis-male, because of reading historical fiction that's not military wankery.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> because of reading historical fiction that's not military wankery. wondering what the gender breakdown is on that category?
- kokanee 5y agoWhat does it mean to "know" a word? I have heard/read most of the male words hundreds of times, and probably used them myself, but asked to define them I would be either inaccurate or unconfident. For example, I know that ailerons are flaps on an airplane, but I'm not sure which ones. I know that a femtosecond is a small unit of time, but I'm not sure what fraction of a second.
- Beltalowda 5y agoI find that giving a precise "dictionary definition" of a word is actually quite hard in general for many common words. Anyway, the data is based on [1], which asks "I know this word"/"I don't know this word". It's also available in Dutch[2] which is a bit different and asks "this word exists"/"this word doesn't exist". Both tests include both actual words as well as made-up words. I did this test a few years back and my "score" was about 80% for Dutch (my native language) and 60% for English. I was a little but surprised by the fairly large gap between Dutch and English, since I've been speaking English almost exclusively for the last ten years (on account of living abroad), which goes to show just how hard it is to really learn a language to native-levels. [1]: http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start [2]: http://woordentest.ugent.be/woordentest http://woordentest.ugent.be/woordentest
- azeirah 5y agoIn Wittgensteinian fashion, if you can use a word, you know it.
- puffoflogic 5y agoFascinating; as a man, I can roughly define every single better-known-by-men word in the chart ("bushido" gave me the most trouble); whereas of the better-known-by-women words, I recognize only three and can define them very poorly (without checking my answers to a dictionary: I believe that "kohl" is some kind of mineral cosmetic [historical?]; "verbena" is an herb; and I'm most sure of "sateen" being a kind of cotton cloth which can be used in bedding).
- glonq 5y agoKohl is that store where you can buy last season's clothes for like 80% off ;)
- pmarreck 5y agoThe fact that "shemale" is the most well-known male word really speaks to the sexual insecurity of males
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoHow's that? Sure it's a slur and not as proper as "woman with a penis", but the fact that men are looking at porn of trans women, hey at least they think we're hot, right?
- pmarreck 5y agoHeh, yeah, I don't like the slur aspect, but regular straight dudes (especially if they have even a slight inclination towards nonstraight) seem tremendously preoccupied with their masculinity or lack thereof. I thought it was a sign of that and not necessarily interest, but interest is fine!
- pmarreck 5y agoI once lost first-place in a spelling bee with a word I'd never seen before (as a guy): "Leotard" I spelled it exactly as it sounded: "Leatard" /eyeroll
- rsynnott 5y agoHrm. I wonder did they just ask if people recognized them? I'd be very surprised if 40% of people could define 'azimuth', say.
- Out_of_Characte 5y agoI think that's all you can test with words. Separate the nonsense words from ones with a defined meaning.
- mesozoic 5y agoSooo... I'm 42nd percentile on word knowledge I guess.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoWhat does knowing all of them say about me? O_o
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoGuess you're non-binary lol
- ru552 5y agoN = 388
- telesilla 5y agoI am a tech nerd woman brought up in a seamstress/gardener household. Every single word I have no issue defining and using in context. However, I shared this with a group of women who are not in tech or fashion and they didn't know much either. I think this is pretty flawed.
- altairprime 5y agoAs someone who was raised in the United States as male and then became female later in life, I know every word in the female-prevalent list, and my knowledge of those words can primarily be traced to either my long-term desire to be a woman or to research performed during my transition. The majority of these terms are simply women’s fashion terms, and aren’t considered “men’s” fashion terms to the majority of US men. ‘Pessary’ is domain-specific, and I only learned that one a couple months ago, because it turns out to be essential knowledge if you’re considering your options during transition. However, while I can say I recognize every word on this list with certainty, I can explain 100% of the men’s words but only about 50% of the women’s words. Clearly I have more work left to do on my transition :)
- jedberg 5y agoLike a lot of other commenters here, I knew all the male words and some of the female ones (which I mostly picked up after we started trying to have children or actually had them), but what I found most interesting was going down the list of words and getting stumped at exactly the spot where more women than men know the word (but now I know what chambray is!).
- jl6 5y agoWish we had more females commenting here. For what it’s worth, my wife knew hardly any of the “female” words either.
- janeerie 5y agoOne data point here - I knew all the female words and 15 of the male words. I definitely feel more confident about what the female ones mean, though.
- ramshorns 5y agoIt might still be a biased sample. Probably most people on this website regardless of gender are interested in science and technology.
- escapedmoose 5y agoAnother data point for you: I knew ~80% of the words from both sides. Because I read sci-fi, study Japanese, and sew. I feel like I broke the test.
- teekert 5y agoThe had me in the first half (not gonna lie) thinking that I just don’t know any of these words because I’m not a native speakers… But then I knew all the words in the second half. I’ll be showing this to my female techy colleagues, see what they get. I know for a fact that they know many of the latter. So I’m curious how this distributes over age or wage etc. Of course, the true meaning of this statistic is in the absolute numbers which aren’t shown. Ie the number could be representing a massive amount of males and show tech bias, the other numbers could be representing a very low amount of females in fashion (it seems like).
- playdead 5y agoI didn't know all the male-leaning words tbh, but it's not hard to have an educated guess that "neodymium" is probably a chemical element, thermister is probably something in physics related to thermodynamics, that a teraflop is computer-related (at first I thought, terabyte + floppy disk?), etc. Didn't know azimuth, aileron, or strafe but they're all cool, and I'm glad I learned. I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK. I only learned about servos a couple years back in a maker-space YouTube channel.
- toyg 5y ago> I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK. Before the '80s, practically nobody outside Japan knew what the Yakuza was. Business development over that decade popularized its existence, so (American) writers picked it up, but after the cyberpunk wave (which abused it), it has largely fallen from favour as a narrative device outside Japan. Ironically, this mirrors somewhat the power the Yakuza can actually wield nowadays: after the Lost Decade of Japanese stagflation, and the rise of Eastern-European gangs (the real bosses of the globalized criminal network, at least in terms of raw "wetwork"), the Yakuza was significantly diminished.
- playdead 5y agoInteresting. Yeah, I grew up in the 90s, so in addition to tamagotchi and pokemon, I became aware at some point about the Japanese mob.
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoIf I'm reading this right, the results were gathered via setting up a website, spreading the word, and allowing anyone visiting the website to participate. I'd expect these results would mostly only be relevant to the "very online."
- in_cahoots 5y agoYeah, these results don’t pass the smell test. As a woman, I sincerely doubt the percentages quoted for terms like pessary and doula- if you and your peers aren’t having children you’re unlikely to have heard of them. And doulas are a more recent phenomenon in the US, I doubt many women over 60 or women in lower socioeconomic classes are familiar with the term. Same for men. I can’t believe most men know what a checksum is. This test says more about the population of people who took it than anything else.
- Nebasuke 5y agoIt looked reasonable to me. Pessary was part of regular sex education for my school. I was surprised the numbers were so low, but this might be sex education in the US not discussing this. Checksum you'll encounter as a term when you use newsgroups, torrents and often on the download page as an MD5 checksum when you download software.
- in_cahoots 5y agoI just learned about pessary last month, after my second child and two different sex ed curricula. And what percent of American adults use newsgroups or torrents, or even download software these days? It’s surely not the majority (software downloads notwithstanding).
- janandonly 5y agoAll the words on the female side seem to be fake words (except for two) ?
- jfk13 5y agoI take it you're a roughly-average male?
- vbtemp 5y agoFascinating. I could explain, in detail, every single much-better-known-by-men word. I did not recognize a single better-known-by-female word, with the exception of doula.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoNext: correlate with college admission test vocabulary, see how biased they are.
- smudgy 5y agoMind... blown!
- kar5pt 5y agoDid they really put "shemale" on the list?
- kokanee 5y agoWhat's so weird about female tamales?
- Kye 5y agoIt's one of those words that was applied to people who had no real say in it, and some people are taking a bit to catch up now that trans and intersex people have an actual voice. There's no Grand Queer Consortium deciding it, so you'll find people who don't care, but it's broadly Not Okay now.
- jolen33 5y agoI don't know how much flak I will get for making a comment like this, but feel it's important to point out the data is obviously biased for (or at least the article doesn't specifically call out): 1. Western society's influence 2. Cultural background influence 3. Sex assigned at birth influence
- heurisko 5y ago> 3. Sex assigned at birth influence I'm not on-board with appropriating literature on DSDs, where sex was to some extent "assigned" in cases of ambiguity. It's an appropriation that serves a political viewpoint that sex as an internal feeling, rather than a reality that is recorded; not assigned.
- fudged71 5y agoIs it possible to see a larger list?
- spiznnx 5y agoCheck out ESM 2 from the study, which includes all 60k words. The Male vs Female prevalence is the third sheet in the xlsx. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.3758%2Fs13428-018-1077-9/MediaObjects/13428_2018_1077_MOESM2_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.3758%2Fs134...
- fudged71 5y agoTop 50 female: peplum tulle chiffon chignon bandeau garland freesia chenille kohl tarragon taupe cohosh bodice taffeta primrose trimester verbena doula murderess ruche tresses amorous boucle peony damask antagonistic sarong stridor zoological beau espadrille mimosa skittles guacamole pessary shirtdress underwire caddy chambray colicky grosgrain jacquard progesterone wallflower bangle bin clairvoyance fibroid menopausal whipstitch Top 50 male: catacomb strafe parsec depressurize shemale bushido bailout hafnium numeral contextualize teraflop neodymium femtosecond tomahawk piezoelectricity paladin kevlar yakuza neurotoxic moonlit crosshair afterburner gigabit trailblazer randomization katana howitzer thermistor enabler codec claymore airstrike derby banshee submersible mach flaccidness checksum boson aileron unplayable preciously encyclopedic siege gauss gaijin degauss unranked servo reverb
- rdiddly 5y agoLook no further than this for evidence of men's famous underrepresentation in the textile arts.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dukeofdoom 5y agoWould be interesting if this could be expended and linked to personality types based on their past communications. Marketing applications, and possibly diagnostic. Maybe you could predict someone falling into depression based on a change in their vocabulary for example.
- Bolkan 5y agoHow was checksum known by >50% of men? When would a non programmer come across this word?
- prionassembly 5y agoTable presents p = Prob(knows word | male). The unconditional probability P(male) is around 1/2 or a little less. Then Prob(male | knows word) = Prob(knows word | male) P(male) / P(knows word). --- Now, we're not given P(knows_word), but assuming answers are from a reasonably balanced sample, we know that P(knows word) = P(male)P(knows word|male) + P(female)P(knows word|female) = [P(knows|m]+P(knows|f)]/2 Going back: Prob(m | knows) = 0.5Prob(knows | m) / 0.5[P(knows|m]+P(knows|f)] Which gives us a formula. E.g. for peplum, Prob(m|knows) is 13%/(13%+64%) = 13/77 ~= 16.8% For "shemale": 88%/(88%+54%) = 88/142 ~= 62.0% So sometimes the actual "maleness" or "femaleness" of the word is overstated, while sometimes its underestimated. This isn't a critique of an article, it's a literal comment. --- Edit: The drive to procrastinate today is strong. Here are the probabilities for all words. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-UP3qTJ3GZ3BpsA0ZNaMgVBZI86iZCDX?usp=sharing https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-UP3qTJ3GZ3BpsA0ZNa...
- lxe 5y agoThis is arts & crafts nerd words vs sci/tech nerd words
- tetsusaiga 5y agoI wonder what the ages of the selected participants in the shown data set were. I recognized all of the male words, but I sent the female words to my girlfriend, and she barely knew any. She suggested that younger women might not know these words. That could just be a self-rationalization for not knowing them, but I didn't see the paper address the issue of age much, or generational changes. I wonder how that plays into this.
- francisofascii 5y agoI suspect the 388 participants in this study were from top educational backgrounds. These words are very niche. So a pool of average people are not going to score 80-90% success on any of those words. That may also indicate why there is a such a large difference. When you compare people who are already at the extremes, you tend to see larger differences than comparing people at the mean.
- tetsusaiga 5y agoAhh, that's a very good observation. I'm surprised that wasn't my first thought as well.
- zestyping 5y agoI'm really surprised "boson" did so well with women. Or, more precisely, that "boson" and "femtosecond" are so far apart. "Boson" seems far more obscure.
- escapedmoose 5y agoBut the Higgs boson! Who doesn’t remember the good old Higgs boson?
- FabHK 5y agoVery useful if you ever participate in a Turing Test (original version, ie the imitation game).
- readthenotes1 5y agoI call Bull... Non replicability on this one. Maybe half the guys have heard or seen femtosecond, but I don't believe if you polled a random sampling of men that they would know off the top of their head what its actual duration is.
- in_cahoots 5y agoAgreed. Same with checksum.
- throwaway48375 5y ago>For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. Nowhere in the study were they asked to define it.
- dzink 5y agoAs a female not born in the US, I am familiar with most of the male words and only some of the female. I'd say the distribution is affected more by US culture than gender.
- nverno 5y agoThe data they used was ~3/4 USA, 1/4 UK.
- oh_sigh 5y agoI think it says more about stereotypical interests rather than anything intrinsic about the sexes. The male words are actually just nerddom, science and tech(incl military tech), and porn. The female words are just fashion and reproductive words. May I guess that you're more into science and tech than you are into fashion?
- magicroot75 5y agoStereotypes, in this case, seem to be borne out by the data.
- Wiseacre 5y ago> and porn Are you talking about Shémale? Pretty sure it's a fashion brand.
- AussieWog93 5y ago>Are you talking about Shémale? Pretty sure it's a fashion brand. Thought he was joking at first, but nope! They're a fashion brand. Google "Shémale pearl necklace" and you can see their stylish jewellery range!
- dustintrex 5y agoAh yes, a perfect term to image search at work while doing a little Valentine's Day shopping.
- floxy 5y agoAll right, who is going to write the adaptive wordle that learns which answers are easiest for you, so that it can select the harder ones.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoI’m super interested in the “shemale” terminology. What’s the stark difference or explanation there? The others I can generally buy as nerd culture, but what does that have to do with a gendered slur? And similarly, why isn’t there a similar reflection of at least one term of bigotry or ignorance specifically females are more likely to know?
- Nebasuke 5y agoI would assume that's the case because it's commonly used in pornography (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemale) and males statistically watch more pornography.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoWhy isn’t there a term overwhelmingly used in romance/erotica then, which is famously women-catered? And women consume a lot of romance/erotica.
- throwaway48375 5y agoCan you think of one?
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoI’m not a woman and I don’t consume romance/erotica so no. I’m only aware of how big romance is because I’m a writer, and it’s no secret romance authors far and away make the most money.
- Nebasuke 5y agoI'm not sure I fully get the question. The landscape of romance novels might be getting different now, but from what I used to see, a lot of the older romance novels feature mainly standard heterosexual romance. So I'm not sure why there would be a term that's overwhelmingly used as there generally wouldn't be such a term?
- ksenzee 5y agoI'm a woman software engineer, and I recognize every one of those as a word, which I think was the criterion being measured. (There are a few on each side I can't define but have definitely seen.) I'm mostly floored by how many of the textile words people here don't recognize, to the point of thinking they're "fake words." Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or apartment? I mean, espadrille, sure, that's a woman's shoe guys might not ever see the word for. But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch?
- rambojazz 5y agoYou recognize all of them? You have superpowers! I only recognized 1, maybe 2 of the female words. When I buy textile stuff I only look for a couple of fabrics that I already know, simply because I don't want to enter another rabbit hole. I think this is also how most people shop about stuff that they need but don't really care much about.
- saberience 5y agoI think that’s the point of the article :)
- kelnos 5y ago> But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch? I recognized chenille (but couldn't remember what it meant, outside of knowing it was textile-related), but I'd never heard of damask or jacquard before. I do own my own home, but actually don't have curtains (blinds/shades instead). I do have a couch (three of them!), and these words never came up. I was just given giant books of fabric swatches, and I chose by look and feel. I don't recall any of them having descriptive names with technical terms, just a marketing name and item number.
- Wiseacre 5y agoAre you sure you aren't confusing chenille for Chanel? I made that mistake.
- showerst 5y ago
- AndriyKunitsyn 5y agoI wonder what it means to "know" a word. If I know that progesterone is some kind of a hormone, but I have no idea what it does, do I know this word?
- raydev 5y agoThere are several words in this chart that I cannot associate with anything, nor recall having seen them before. At least personally, I would say I know a word by knowing under what context it can be used, and I don't even have that.
- otatoppot 5y agoThe test subjects were presented the "real" words with fake words mixed in, like "stoinka" or "gomuti" or "alsike". So to "recognize" a word simply meant, did the test subject says "yes, this is a word used by English speakers", and not "yes, I could define it or give an example of the word's usage in a correct context".
- kelnos 5y agoChecks out, at least anecdotally. I recognized (and could define) every one of the "male" words, but I recognized only 6 of the "female" words, and could probably only define one or two of them.
- shpx 5y agoIt's a shame that dictionaries don't collect and include this kind of data, since a word is the set of people that will understand that specific definition if you use it.
- c7DJTLrn 5y agoNot a very big sample size but I do find it interesting how the males lean towards more technical terms. A result of sexism in education, not biological differences, I'm sure...
- geuis 5y agoCan someone help the layman here? I don't understand how to read that graph.
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoIt's surprising that damask is so far below katana for males.
- zuminator 5y agoMy initial impression glancing at that list was that it was maybe taken from a survey of French speakers, because the first few words looked totally alien to me. Then I recognized freesia, then a few more words coalesced. All told, I'm more or less familiar with only 5-7 of the "female" words but every single one of the "male" words are very familiar to me.
- random-human 5y ago
- chaosbutters314 5y agokind of weird and offensive to put a transgender slur on here.
- orangepurple 5y agoThere is no way 48% of males know what a thermistor is. This whole statistic is biased to the point of uselessness. Cute, though.
- dudeinjapan 5y agoIf one knows the words "thermal" and "resistor" one can pretty easily guess the meaning.
- scotty79 5y agoMakes me wonder who did they ask.
- scythmic_waves 5y agoFrom the paper, participants didn't need to define the word. They just had to recognize that it was a real word [1]: > Participants and the vocabulary test used > > For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end of the test, participants received information about their performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage of nonwords identified as words. For instance, a participant who responded “yes” to 55 of the 67 words and to 2 of the 33 nonwords received feedback that they knew 55/67 – 2/33 = 76% of the English vocabulary. Granted, there's nothing stopping a participant from responding "Yes" to a word they can't define. But I think that's more likely to happen on words that the participant knows of even if they can't define it. Here's the test, BTW [2]. It appears to still be up. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9#Sec4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9#... [2] http://vocabulary.ugent.be/ http://vocabulary.ugent.be/
- zild3d 5y agothis was the word that made me question the data as well. Had never heard of a thermistor until EE classes in university
- aufhebung 5y agoI would wager that some percent of them confused it for thermostat.
- martindbp 5y agoI remember reading an article when I was a teenager about how very few men, but most women could tell whether a specific disease (don't remember which one) was caused by a virus or bacteria. It also claimed that the statistics were reversed for knowing whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa. I had no idea about the virus/bacteria thing, felt ridiculous to me. But intrigued, I asked my mother about the sun and earth and she responded: "I don't know, I've never even thought about it". Shocked to say the least. I learned that day that men and women are very different on average, despite being told otherwise my whole life.
- abdel_nasser 5y agoever since the neolithic society has had a habit of trying really hard to gaslight people about utter nonsense. and all we got for it was bread and penicillin.
- soueuls 5y agoI would have never guessed that some people could hesitate between whether the Earth is revolving around the sun or not. Wow.
- fleddr 5y agoI once met a woman that actually believed that the moon constantly changes in shape and luminosity. Mind you, a fully functioning adult with a good job. I'm not posting this to make fun of it, rather to say that in general people have absolutely no idea how anything in the world works. They know what they need to know.
- elil17 5y agoI’ve met a man who didn’t know what a coffee maker was and a (American) woman who thought there were 26 states. The range of what people don’t know is so much broader than you can possible imagine. (Also would be shocked if someone didn’t know which common illnesses were viral and which weren’t - seems like basic knowledge along the lines of heliocentrism to me)
- karaterobot 5y agoThey made the word prevalence table available, but I can't load it into my spreadsheet program. The question I'm trying to answer is, are the words in Table 2 the words that differed the most by gender, or were they selected as representative examples? In other words, if the title of that table is just "Words known better by males than by females..." should I interpret that as meaning "[some examples of] words known better by males than females and vice versa", or "words known [best] by males and females, and vice versa"?
- tqi 5y agoWhat does "knowing" a word mean? Is it just recognizing that the word is a valid word? I am skeptical that 80% of men recognize that "boson" is a word, but only about 50% of women could put together "shemale" from context clues.
- scotty79 5y agoHiggs boson was pretty famous.
- abdel_nasser 5y agothis is clearly the result of societal programming. i propose that we eliminate all of these words from the dictionaries. we dont need any of these words anyway.
- syngrog66 5y agoI'll add 2 things here in the spirit of the discussion. One, I dabble in amateur fiction writing as a hobby. And I'm a man, but a big percentage of my readers are female. One thing I've been hit on the head with repeatedly, when getting feedback from female readers, is how often how sensitive they can be about the exact choice of words or phrasing I use. My 1st draft will be a certain way. After getting feedback from female readers, I often have to revise the text to tweak the words and phrases in it, to make it less distasteful or alienating for them. Note... this is NOT me "perceiving" it to be this way -- instead it is based on what happens factually. Over the years since 1st getting bitten by this (decades now) I've learned enough about the gender differences in reading perception that it doesn't bother me as much anymore, and I can more often make my 1st draft such that it lacks these kinds of "gender perception difference bombs". Basically, as a fiction writer, you must be VERY aware of gender differences, at scale, in order to produce the most popular final draft. Any experienced writer will tell you this. Two... I got into the Wordle playing thing, and in recent weeks there was a solution word which caused a minor kerfluffle among fans. I was on Twitter one day and stumbled into threads where lots of women were complaining about that day's solution word. Some said it was soooo bad, that when a female player would only hear indirectly about how icky the word was on Twitter -- without literally seeing the answer -- they could often guess what it was, in 1 attempt. just 1 attempt! And they would post screenshots and result shareouts to prove they could solve it in 1 attempt. The word was "moist". MOIST! I remember it when it happened because for me, for whatever reason, it had taken like 5 tries to solve it, with no outside social media hints. Yet lots of women were nailing in 1 or 2 tries. So... never tell me that males and females are identical or somehow "equal" when it comes to "neural language wiring" or at least not in their reading perception biases. We are different. In broadstrokes. At scale. Reliably.
- renewiltord 5y agoInteresting. If someone were describing a word as "icky" in Internet subcultures, I'd guess "moist", not because it's actually icky, but because it's Internet subculture. It's sort of how if someone on the Internet said "He's got a fedora", I would conclude that they're saying "This guy is a dork". In the real world, it would likely be a statement of fact, and based on the girls I hang out with, a statement of fashion. Without evidence to back it, I'd hypothesize that this is a subculture effect, more than a gender effect.
- rkapsoro 5y agoWow, I know 100% of the male-identified words and none of the female ones. I expected more overlap. I'm not the only one in comments to say this, but perhaps it is interesting to see multiple people reporting this.
- jdprgm 5y agoThis was interesting but just wanted to note they defined "known" based off of a test where you are asked yes/no on a series of words based on if they are an actual English word or made up. Not remotely if you can accurately define/use them and they didn't go into details on how often people were voting "yes" on words that turned out to not even exist. I would be absolutely shocked in a random sample of American men if even 20% could accurately define "aileron" or "azimuth".
- tdeck 5y agoI was also curious about the population of participants. The paper has this to say: > The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/ http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. > we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. That's a pretty large sample, although I wonder how they recruited the participants. It may be in the paper but I couldn't find mention of that in a quick skim.
- AussieWog93 5y agoI was shocked at first to see that most women didn't know what a "servo" was, then I remembered it means something different in Australia...
- LatteLazy 5y agoDoes anyone else feel many of the "men's" works are just physics terms (boson, femtosecond, pizoelectric)? And maybe a second grouping around Japanese cultural cliches (Bushido, Katana)? Is there a similar set in the women's words that isn't apparent to a male physics grad like me?
- escapedmoose 5y agoAs a tech/sci-fi nerd and avid crafter, I accept your collective awe at my knowledge of the majority of these words
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gnicholas 5y agoWhen I was picking a name for my startup, I was considering Sidewinder. I liked it because it implied speed/accuracy and indicates lateral movement (my startup makes a speed-reading tool that helps you move your eyes more quickly). When I asked my girlfriend what she thought, it didn't resonate at all. I asked around further, and it turned out men reliably knew about Sidewinders and thought the name was cool, and women thought about the snake, if anything. I had been concerned about the war-related connotation, but I dropped it from my shortlist because the name didn't work at all with half the population.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoVery random, but in the 80s, years after my Grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Denmark he started a company called Sidewinder which made ladders that wheel/move around the sides of farming silos for painting/repair, etc. Funny to see it show up in your comment 40 years later :)
- benkaiser 5y ago100% of Australians knows what a servo[0] is [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Servo https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Servo
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thedailymail 5y agoI am very skeptical that ~50% of all men in the US know what thermistor means. The Methods section is not clear about whether people who "indicated" they knew a word actually did know what the word meant. My skepticism applies equally to several of the words chosen as indices of rare comprehension: "The percentages of people indicating they knew the word ranged from 2% (for stotinka, adyta, kahikatea, gomuti, arseniuret, alsike, . . .)" I strongly doubt that 1 in 50 randomly selected people could define "kahikatea" or "arseniuret."
- yaacov 5y agoYou’re misunderstanding the paper. This is not the number of people who can correctly define the word, it’s the number of people who can correctly recognize that it is actually a word.
- mankyd 5y agoThey don't. You can click through and take the test. It doesn't ask you if you know what any of the words mean. It simply presents you with words, some esoteric, some common, and some _imaginary_. You are simply asked to sort the real words from the fictional.
- kccqzy 5y agoIn case anyone wants to take the test: http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start
- amelius 5y agoI would love to see this for Wikipedia articles, but based on age, not gender. E.g. "This fact is known by 95% of people at age 21".
- AnnikaL 5y agoThis feels like a reflection of social norms... most (but not all) female words are related to fashion and most (but not all) male words are related to STEM. I do think it's weird that words like "yakuza", "katana", and "bushido" (which are related to Japanese culture) are more common among men; is this an effect of, for lack of a better word, weeb/anime culture among men? I'm surprised that "verbena" is so low on the list; I found it to be a really common scent especially in hair products (specifically lemon verbena). Maybe that's my female bias?
- elboru 5y agoNot only anime. As a kid American shows and movies were full on “ninjas” and “karate”. My favorite cartoon was TMNT and one my favorite movies was Karate kid.
- emptysea 5y agoI think yakuza, katana, and bushido have less to do with weeb/anime culture than video games and movies. I bet yakuza, katana, and bushido could all be picked up watching Kill Bill & playing some Call of Duty set in WW2.
- quadhome 5y agoWordle Words Known Better by Males Than Females, and Vice Versa https://observablehq.com/@drsr/wordle-words https://observablehq.com/@drsr/wordle-words
- clarge1120 5y agoNo wonder I can hardly understand my wife… and vice-versa.
- elil17 5y agoSeems like all you men don’t know enough about fabric and garments. This may be leading you to purchase poor quality garments. If I may recommend a solid introduction: How to Assess the Quality of Garments by Anushka Rees. https://anuschkarees.com/blog/2014/05/01/how-to-assess-the-quality-of-garments-a-beginners-guide-part-i https://anuschkarees.com/blog/2014/05/01/how-to-assess-the-q...
- shp0ngle 5y ago> verbena Ha ha luckily I just played Witcher 3
- lovemenot 5y agoLinguistic sexual dimorphism. Many men on this thread seem surprised at just how "male" they seem to be. Perhaps tech-awareness has become a defining trait of maleness, just as a large musculature has become mostly redundant.
- leonry 5y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183 (8 years ago)
- wink 5y agoFascinating, in the UK/US one I was 10 vs 9, here it's 5 vs 19, as a non-native speaker.
- Planktonne 5y agoFrom the linked paper: >For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end of the test, participants received information about their performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage of nonwords identified as words. I think a lot of commenters are understanding the task as "define with confidence" rather than "recognise as a meaningful word". I couldn't give you a firm definition of many listed words, but I only don't recognise 2 of them. It's definitely interesting, but I think it raises questions about sample quality and respondent confidence at least as much as it provides information about sex & gender differences.
- dwg465 5y agoseems like some sampling bias. you're telling me 80% of men in the U.S. know's what a `parsec` is? seems high
- Volker_W 5y agoThere was probably some bias in the selection of the participants. I don't think 50 % of the average male population know "piezoelectricity".
- LambdaTrain 5y agoAs someone who is not a native-English speaker, it is interesting to see a couple of familiar words in male category such as katana, yakuza, azimuth, etc. Probably due to my gaming hobbies... And none of words in female category ring a bell to me, which is not surprising since I do not even recognize most of them in my native language.
- diedyesterday 5y agoNot knowing those upper words and knowing these lower words is actually a badge of honor ;)