Though he’s best known as the author of cultlike webcomic xkcd, Randall Munroe has plenty of other hobbies: For instance, tormenting strangers by making them take an endless color-naming survey. Munroe grilled 222,500 willing participants on the names of 954 different colors.
In the “men do things like this, women do things like this” department, Munroe found some … interesting disparities between the color names most disproportionately popular among men versus women:
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:
Dusty Teal
Blush Pink
Dusty Lavender
Butter Yellow
Dusky Rose
Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:
Penis
Gay
WTF
Dunno
Baige
I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter. I weep for my gender.
Check out the full survey over at xkcd’s blog.
