When social media users recently discovered a 2018 study about words with major differences in the shares of men and women who know them, one common response was incredulity about how anyone could not know one set of words. Or the other set.
"Why did they just put ordinary words in one column and obscure words in the other?" one X user wrote.
YouGov asked Americans to select words they knew the meaning of from a list including words the 2018 study identified as male- or female-skewing. The list of 58 words also included a selection of very common words as well as made-up pseudowords. Each respondent was asked about a random sample of 20 of the 58 words.
Men are more likely than women to say they're familiar with all the words the original study found were better known by men than women. Many of those words come from science, engineering, or technology, such as parsec (a unit of astronomical distance), boson (a subatomic particle), and checksum (a computing tool for verifying data integrity).
Women are more likely than men to say they know each of the female-skewing words from the 2018 study. Many of these words relate to fabric or fashion, such as tulle (a textile), chignon (a hairstyle), and whipstitch (a sewing technique).
In contrast, the common words and the made-up words show little or no differences between the shares of men and women who say they understand them.
YouGov did not test whether Americans who say they are familiar with the meaning of a word really understand it.
Methodology: The poll was conducted among 2,170 U.S. adult citizens on two separate 2025 surveys from December 18 - 22 and December 19 - 22. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of U.S. adult citizens. A random sample (stratified by gender, age, race, education, geographic region, and voter registration) was selected from the 2019 American Community Survey. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, U.S. region, 2024 presidential vote, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status. 2024 presidential vote, at time of weighting, was estimated to be 48% Harris and 50% Trump. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given around November 8, 2024, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (31% Democratic, 32% Republican). The margin of error for the overall sample is approximately 3%.
Image: Getty (Daniel de la Hoz)
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