Ten years ago, using language from the incel community in regular conversation would land you with a couple of weird looks and an awkward silence.
And for good reason: the hyper-online, seemingly nonsensical phrases of the involuntarily celibate community were specifically constructed for gatekeeping. An “if you know, you know” lexicon meant to distinguish the true incels (“truecels”) from the regular people (“normies”).
Nowadays, joking about being “walkpilled” online will land you a laugh. In schools, being a “sigma” could make you popular. As a woman, “looksmaxxing” promises to teach you how to be more beautiful.
All of these phrases descended from a school of thought that thinks men are entitled to sex from women, and women are lesser beings than men. The very same school of thought that has motivated numerous terror attacks, perpetrated by mass murderers like Elliot Rodger, Jake Davison and Alek Minassian.
And it’s not like no one knows where it comes from. While incels were once relegated to dark corners of the internet, figureheads like Andrew Tate have brought them out into the light. In 2025, the Netflix series Adolescence drove the conversation even further, introducing even the most un-online individuals to the concept of being “blackpilled” (where you fully accept incel ideology) or “the 80/20 rule” (the belief that 80 per cent of women are attracted to the top 20 per cent of men).
Yet incel terminology can regularly be heard on our For You Pages, in our playgrounds, and coming out of the mouths of women, the group it was originally designed to denigrate.
“You get a lot of ‘sigma’ and ‘Chad’,” says east London secondary school teacher Jack*, who has noticed incel-adjacent phrases in use since he first started working in schools four years ago. In the manosphere, being a sigma refers to being a lone wolf, while being a Chad denotes masculinity. Incels generally believe these two types of men to be the most attractive to Stacys (a derisive term towards women), while they are left behind.
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The terms are primarily uttered by boys, but also some girls, says Jack. “It’s just part of their joke vocabulary, where the actual meaning is lost, or at least that’s what I hope,” Jack adds. “When I first started my PGCE, the year nines and up would use it a bit more genuinely; they actually put a lot more onus on those words, especially when Andrew Tate was more prevalent. Now, the year sevens and eights just use it as silly, goofy language, like all year sevens and eights do. With time, more people are saying it, but it’s lost its potency.”
So, why have we adopted incel slang so readily? Partially, it’s because it’s designed to be addictive. “Within the incel community itself, language serves the same function as language in a cult: It’s a recruitment tool creating an ‘us versus them’ mentality,” writes Adam Aleksic in Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. “I would argue that, if anything, the incel example is very important to understand, for it has probably contributed more to the development of ‘modern slang’ than any other online community.”
@etymologynerd the phrsse "it's over" was likely also popualrized by incels #etymology #linguistics #language #socialmedia #algospeak #culture #technology
♬ original sound - etymologynerd
Then there’s incel-ese's uniquely negative tone of voice. In Amanda Montell’s 2024 book The Age of Magical Overthinking, she highlights the rise of “doomslang”, where serious phrases like “I want to kill myself” and “I’m dissociating” have become commonplace. In Algospeak, Aleksic points out that one of 2025’s favourite phrases, “It’s so over” (the other side of the coin to “We are so back”), originally emanates from incel forums. As people’s outlook on the world becomes increasingly bleak, incel-speak slips neatly into our lexicon.
But the big question remains: is it hurting anyone? As secondary school teacher Jack posited, more people using incel terminology may only serve to dilute its potency. If incel speak loses all meaning to mockery, then surely that’s a good thing?
Aleksic warns it may not be that simple. “On incel sites, longtime truecels use the terms ‘Newgen’ and ‘Tiktokcel' to describe those who only recently joined their forums from short-form video platforms,” he writes in Algospeak. “The Incels Wiki lists the looks-maxxing trend on TikTok as a primary driver of this recent incel influx, meaning that the meme pipeline has had at least some efficacy in making the blackpill more accessible.” In other words, incel terminology becoming mainstream has introduced it to a new audience, some of whom are curious to learn more.
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And that doesn’t just mean men. Over on TikTok, a section of the incel school of thought known as “lookism” has infiltrated female beauty standards. Lookism is the incel belief that “people associate aesthetic appearance with all sorts of positive qualities” and that it is “brutal lookism that keeps [incels] from getting any matches” (as per Incel Wiki). Lookism often leads to looksmaxxing, where individuals try to maximise their traditional physical attractiveness.
Classic incel lookism concepts include pseudoscientific standards like ‘interocular distance,’ ‘canthal tilt,’ and ‘hunter eyes.’ All of these concepts have gone viral on TikTok in recent years, with women evaluating themselves against TikTok filters of the standards en masse. In one depressing Quora post from 2023, right around when the canthal tilt filter was doing the rounds on TikTok, one user asked: “I’m 14 and have a negative canthal tilt, is this normal? Can I fix it?”
Moreover, incel-ese becoming commonplace can make it harder to track. In Emily Klein and Jennifer Golbeck’s 2024 paper A Lexicon for Studying Radicalisation in Incel Communities, they note that classifying incel language can help with “tracking the frequency of this type of language over time for specific users.” Much like tracking other extremist groups online, this can help to identify individuals most likely to carry out misogynistic violent extremist attacks. But if everyone’s using incel terminology, this muddies the waters.
Incel terminology infiltrating mainstream language might seem silly on the surface. In reality, it has unlocked the doors of our brains and allowed incel ideology to slip through the back unnoticed. We might well be mocking terms like “sleepmaxxing” and “sigma” in public, but if we’re measuring our interocular distance in private, something has clearly worked. And once that kind of idea sticks, it’s awfully hard to get it unstuck.
