Today we've reached two major milestones.
First, we've reached 800 pages of this wiki! It's crazy how fast this wiki is growing. It feels like we only just reached 700 pages. Also, fun fact, since this wiki is almost exactly two years old, it averages out to just a little bit over one page added per day.
Second thing (and the thing I will be talking about for the rest of this post): we've just achieved one article starting with each letter of the alphabet!
Now, you might be thinking "there's only 26 letters, how does it take 800 pages to get one for each letter?" Well, that's actually a bit of a story, which I will tell to you now.
I think it was around 400 articles when I first got the idea of one article per letter of the alphabet. When you're the sort of person who writes and organizing hundreds of wiki pages for fun this is the sort of thing that gets you excited. I was close to the goal at the time, but there were a handful of letters I hadn't gotten yet. At that point I started keeping a close eye out for an identities starting with specific letters. I also became quite interested in the letter distribution in names.
I think the best way to show this is with a graph, which I will show you now:
The first are broken down by category. Yellow: sexuality . Green: gender . Purple: xenogender . Blue: Other, which includes the categories "identity ", "terminology ", ace-spec identity ", and "aro-spec identity ".)
The graph shows the letter distribution across all articles at the time of writing this. (It doesn't exactly add up to the total number of articles because some articles are in multiple categories and therefore are counted twice.) In this graph you can clearly see that some letters are extremely over represented when it comes to identity names. The top five most common letters are:
5) N and V (tied): The letter N gets a boost with all the sexualities that are "no[blank]sexual". There's also a bunch of genders that start with "neu-" and "ni-". V is slightly more surprising, I guess there's just a lot more words that start with V than I thought.
4) G: I understand why the letter G is so high, though it's not as high as I imagined it would be. This is mostly because G is actually under represented in all non-gender categories. If you look in the sexuality category the only G articles are gay , gai , and galaxsexual . The only reason G is as high as it is is because of all the genders that are "gender[blank]".
3) S: S is a popular letter in all categories. It just seems to be popular because it sounds nice and there are a lot of words that start with S. I have noticed that there are a lot of unrelated space words that start with S, which definitely helps.
Between S and C, I'm willing to bet that the [s] sound is the most popular sound to start an identity with.
2) C: C is a bit surprising. I never considered C to be a super common letter, but there is a definite trend towards C names. The weirdest part is that, if you look in the gender, sexuality, and other categories, you'd see that C is pretty average letter. But if you look at the xenogender category C is hugely popular. In fact, C is the most popular letter in the xenogender category. Xenogenders make up almost half the total C articles and I have absolutely no idea why.
1) A: The letter A is massively over represented in all categories, making it by far the most popular letter. It sort of makes sense. A ton of Greek and Latin prefixes start with A. You have the classic a- which includes things like asexual, agender, and any other identity that has to do with lacking something. You also have prefixes like anti- and astro- as well as a ton of other space related words. There are a surprising number of words that start with A in general. It's also just a nice sounding letter. A vowel is always a good strong way to start a word in my opinion. I can totally see why it's such a popular letter.
Now we come to letters that are very rare. Which is the most interesting category in my opinion. Of course you have a few letters that you'd expect to be rare:
J: In terms of J, I expected to be rare, but we got Julietian and Juxera pretty early on. We also have a bit of a collection of Jupiter based xenogenders, there's juparettian, juparian, juperigender, jupitergender, and jupitique.
Q: The letter Q was never an issue. Queer and quoiromantic are well known identities, so they were some of the first articles I made.
X: X was a little bit worrying, but we quickly got xenogender, xirl, xoy, and xumgender/sexual . X is commonly used to represent an "other" and often used to sound "unusual" or "alien" so it's a common letter to use for "unusual" genders.
Z: Z was just a bit troubling when I started looking for articles for each letter. At first all I could think of was zedsexual, but that's just less well known word for allosexual. But I did find zirconic and zodiacgender soon enough.
These were the letters that I expected to be hard, but here's the thing: everyone knows these letters are rare. It's my personal theory that since these letters are known to be rare that means people are actually more likely to use them. Using these letters is a guaranteed way to make a word sound unique, mysterious, or unusual. As it turns out, it's the letters you don't expect to be hard are the one you really need to look out for. In this case K and Y.
K: K was a weirdly hard letter to get. I never considered K to be an uncommon letter but it does make sense. A large amount of LGBT terms are based on Latin and Greek roots. In Ancient Greek the letter k is (classically) romanized to c, and the letter k is extremely rare in Latin. Because of that it took quite a bit before our first K article, but after some digging I have been able to collect a few of them. A few of the interesting ones are:
- Koba: a misspelling of cobalt. Was originally copa. I'm unsure why it was changed but thank the person who did so anyways.
- Kyanitian: Named after kyanite. (Which, the word kyanite, comes from the same root as the word cyan, coming from the Greek word kuaneos. Here we can see the tendency for the Romans to make the Greek letter K into C, which is why we spell cyan with a C. The word kyanite is more recently made, and is a scientific word so the K is kept.)
- Kaugender, klimifluid, klimigender, and kuogender: All come from German words and therefore aren't beholden to the weird rules of the Latin K.
- Keplerique: comes from Kepler objects, which are named after Kepler, which is a German name.
The majority of the K names come from words with Germanic roots.
Y: This is the letter that caused me trouble. This is why it took 800 pages. The letter Y was shockingly difficult to find. I never would have considered this to be a rare letter. If anything I'd say that Y is somewhat common, but I guess when it comes to starting words it's not. I never would've guessed that this would be harder to get than j, x, z, and k combined. I really did look for any sort of Y identity, anything, but no list of genders or sexualities had any Y entries. For some reason no one uses Y to start their identity names.
We were stuck on 25 letters for a long time, and it wasn't until a few days ago when I discovered the first Y identity. I had stumbled onto it by accident when researching another sexuality. It's an incredible obscure term, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to add it. So congratulations to yaesexual for being the first Y article!
To be honest, I expected the xenogender category to be first to get a Y, since it is the category with the most articles, but the sexuality category is the one that got it. And I'm sure there are some xenogenders that start with Y out there, but none that I've stumbled into.
You can go see for yourself on the sexuality page; each letter has at least one article in it.