Manly words. Girly words. How many of each do you know?
Researchers from the Center for Reading Research looked at the first 500,000 results of Ghent University’s online vocabulary test, focusing on differences in gender. It turns out that some words exhibited a large margin between the percent of men and women who reported knowing them.
Here are the words that men were most likely to recognize over women and the percentages that men and women knew the words.
I know the meaning of all 12 words.
- codec (88, 48)
- solenoid (87, 54)
- golem (89, 56)
- mach (93, 63)
- humvee (88, 58)
- claymore (87, 58)
- scimitar (86, 58)
- kevlar (93, 65)
- paladin (93, 66)
- bolshevism (85, 60)
- biped (86, 61)
- dreadnought (90, 66)
Here are the words that women were most likely to know over men and the same percentages.
I know the meaning of 8 out of the 12 words.
I have a good guess about bottlebrush and tresses, but have not idea what flouncy or flouncing are.
- taffeta (48, 87)
- tresses (61, 93)
- bottlebrush (58, 89)
- flouncy (55, 86)
- mascarpone (60, 90)
- decoupage (56, 86)
- progesterone (63, 92)
- wisteria (61, 89)
- taupe (66, 93)
- flouncing (67, 94)
- peony (70, 96)
- bodice (71, 96)