Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Incel Lexicon: Deciphering The Emergent Cryptolect Of A Global Misogynistic Community, Kelly Caroline Gothard

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Evolving out of a gender-neutral framing ofan involuntary celibate identity, the concept of `incels' has come to refer to an online community of men who bear antipathy towards themselves, women, and society-at-large for their perceived inability to find and maintain sexual relationships. By exploring incel language use on Reddit, a global online message board, we contextualize the incel community's online expressions of misogyny and real-world acts of violence perpetrated against women. After assembling around three million comments from incel-themed Reddit channels, we analyze the temporal dynamics of a data driven rank ordering of the glossary of phrases belonging to an …