Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

Strange. All the male words are perfectly commonplace, and all the female ones appear to be completely made up.

This is brilliant. Like that time the psychiatrist showed me endless silhouettes of my parents fighting, and kept asking me, "What do you see here?"

I had the same experience. Googling them, I see the following categories:

- (Women's) clothing and cosmetics (peplum, bandeau, kohl, espadrille, whipstitch)

- Hair style (chignon)

- Fabrics and weaving (ruche, bouclé, chenille, voile, sateen, jacquard, damask, chambray)

- Women's health (pessary, doula)

- Flowers (Freesia, Verbena)

Interestingly, half of these words aren't even in Firefox's dictionary it seems. Even with "English (United States, large)" some words are underlined with red squiggles.

Most excessively male-recognised words seem to come from technical fields or science, or Japanese culture, weirdly enough. The only explanation I can give for most men seemingly knowing "shemale" is porn.

My conclusion for this data: men tend to know fewer words relating to clothes and aesthetics, women tend to know fewer words relating to science and Japanese culture. As the recognition for "female" words is much lower than that of the "male" words, I'd say that this is because of a lack of men with knowledge about clothes.

Almost nothing is in the Firefox dictionary, it’s a serious problem with the browser: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499593

Discoverable, Rebecca, amongst, captcha, jokester - just to give a few examples of normal words that Firefox doesn’t know.

At first I thought “all the female words must be in some other language”.

It does seem like the female words are more obviously foreign (specifically French) whereas the male words tend towards being more technical.

I'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.

Of course the roots of English include Greek and Latin and German, but words like femtosecond or piezoelectricity or teraflop or milliamp are technical terms, not old but standard words imported from another language. Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that was common in another language and then imported into English.

    Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that was common in another language and then imported into English.

Worth noting that by the percentages here fewer than 50% of males surveyed were familiar with it.

"Chambray", "chignon", "bandeau" etc. are also standard technical words imported from another language.

The female words are technical too, just in a different field to the one you are in.

That’s fair. I guess I meant “technical” in the sense of being associated with math/science/engineering.

Tell me you're male without telling me you're male.

Let me guess...

Such dataset could be used as a gender captcha.

There'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...

Same for me. What a coincidence!

Thanks, that cheered me up this morning! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com