“Jill became interested in cryptozoology after watching a documentary about Big Foot sightings.” 4. The word itself has a Greek origin, with ‘crypto’ coming from the Greek word ‘kryptos’ (‘hidden’), and ‘zoology’ coming from Ancient Greek and meaning ‘the study of animals’. ‘Cryptozoology’ refers to the study of animals that have not yet been proven to exist, with popular examples including Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster. “The football team’s manager set out to bumfuzzle the opposition.” 3. Nevertheless, use of the word ‘bumfuzzle’ is extremely rare.
According to Marriam-Webster, the second part of the word was likely altered, giving us ‘dumbfuzzle’, before the first part was also adjusted. BumfuzzleĪnother way of saying ‘confuse’ or ‘perplex’, this strange-sounding word is believed to have originated from the word ‘dumbfound’. “The man observed some aa lava flowing down the side of the volcano.” 2. Although rarely used in everyday conversation, ‘aa’ is a term used more frequently by those who study geology. More specifically, it refers to ‘a block of lava with a rough or jagged surface’, and the word itself has an Hawaiian origin. How funny is a chicken crossing a road, anyway? Evidently, that depends on whether it farts on the other side.The first word in many English dictionaries, ‘aa’ is a noun, which is used to describe a volcanic rock. With that much settled, Westbury and Hollis hope to extend their research into quantifying the humor values of word pairs - "such as toothy weasel, muzzy muffin and fizzy turd," they wrote - and eventually entire jokes. The perfect funny word, the authors concluded, is "a short, infrequent word composed of uncommon letters," and has a meaning that is "human and insulting, profane, diminutive and/or related to good times." The single funniest phoneme in English turned out to be the vowel sound /u/, as in "guffaw," "humph" and "lummox." This vowel sound appeared in nearly 20 percent of the words judged most funny, the authors wrote. Echoing Westbury's 2016 nonword study, words with an emphasis on relatively uncommon letters - like k, j and y - consistently appeared funny. Word sounds (or "phonemes") played a huge role, too. Both equations agreed that the least-funny words were those with highly negative meanings - such as "violence," "attacks," "rape," " murder" and "harassment." Meanwhile, words with meanings related to sex, bodily functions, insults, animals and partying were consistently predicted to induce giggles (actually, "giggle" was the seventh-funniest word in English, according to the first data model). The second equation, which was written with the help of a special data-modeling program Hollis and Westbury co-created in 2006 (opens in new tab), predicted the funniest words were:Īmong the highest- and lowest-rated words, several clear patterns emerged. One algorithm decided the top five funniest words on the list were: They tested two of their humor equations on a list of more than 45,000 words, then ranked the results in their new paper. With these factors and the pre-existing humor scores for the words in the entire list, the researchers devised several different equations that could, theoretically, predict the humorousness of any given word. Westbury and Hollis looked at each one of the nearly 5,000 words under a humorist microscope, categorizing them based on 20 different factors, including how long the word itself was, how positive or negative the word's meaning was, how common each letter or combination of letters was in English, and whether the word contained a crude or profane-sounding string of characters within it (like "pike" and "bunghole," for example). The Warwick psychologists found that words like " booty," "tinkle" and "nitwit" were consistently ranked as being very funny, while words like "pain," "torture" and "deathbed" were ranked as being decidedly humorless. and scored with funniness ratings by a panel of 800 online participants. They started with a list of 4,997 common words (opens in new tab) previously compiled by a team of psychologists at the University of Warwick in the U.K. In their new study, Westbury and Hollis delved further into the relationship between word sounds, meanings and humor - this time, working with tens of thousands of real English words. Dirty-sounding nonwords like "whong," "dongl" and "focky" also performed very well, suggesting that a word's perceived connotation played a role in humor, even for words that had no real meaning.
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