Humor norms for 4,997 English words

Abstract

Humor ratings are provided for 4,997 English words collected from 821 participants using an online crowd-sourcing platform. Each participant rated 211 words on a scale from 1 (humorless) to 5 (humorous). To provide for comparisons across norms, words were chosen from a set common to a number of previously collected norms (e.g., arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, age of acquisition, and reaction time). The complete dataset provides researchers with a list of humor ratings and includes information on gender, age, and educational differences. Results of analyses show that the ratings have reliability on a par with previous ratings and are not well predicted by existing norms.

Playful iconicity: structural markedness underlies the relation between funniness and iconicity

“…We first consider the relation of funniness ratings to frequency and lexical decision time, the two measures identified by Engelthaler and Hills (2018) as the strongest correlates for perceived funniness. Like them, we find that uncorrected correlations in the full dataset hover around 28%, with log frequency negatively correlating with funniness (less frequent words are rated as more funny) and lexical decision time positively (words with longer reaction times are rated as more funny).…”

“…The analysis comes in four parts. First, using human ratings, we examine the relation between funniness ratings and three other variables: iconicity ratings (our main focus), word frequency (a known covariate of both funniness and iconicity), and lexical decision time (reported by Engelthaler & Hills (2018) as the most important correlate of funniness ratings after frequency). Second, we go beyond known iconicity ratings to test the relation between funniness ratings and imputed iconicity.…”

“…The marked phonology of iconic words has been connected to playful and expressive functions of language (Samarin, 1970;Zwicky & Pullum, 1987;Kunene, 2001;Haiman, 2014), and ideophones have been defined -only partly tongue-incheek -as "those words which are such fun to use" (Welmers, 1973). In an independent strand of research, people have recently started to investigate the perceived funniness of word forms (Westbury, Shaoul, Moroschan, & Ramscar, 2016;Engelthaler & Hills, 2018). One aim of this paper is to make these worlds meet.…”

What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of Laughter and Amusement

“…Nonwords are perceived to be funnier when they resemble words considered inappropriate for polite conversation (“shart,” “fcuk”; Westbury et al, 2016). Similarly, real words tend to be funnier when they denote insults (e.g., “floozy,” “buffoon”), expletives (e.g., “hogwash,” “fuck”), body parts (e.g., “taint,” “booty”), or body functions (e.g., “burp,” “turd”; Engelthaler & Hills, 2018; Westbury & Hollis, 2019), 4 all of which are demeaning, inappropriate, or at least uncomfortable when they occur during polite conversation.…”

Theory of mind and strategic decision-making

“…We also examined the effect of the use of humour by a subject on beliefs formed about their personality. This was accomplished by calculating humour ratings of the text used by each subject, using the humour ratings proposed by Engelthaler and Hills (2018). Table A.11 shows that an increase in 1 standard deviation in the humour rating of the language used by the partner increases beliefs about their extraversion by 0.15 standard deviations (significant at the 1% level) and decreases beliefs about their neuroticism by 0.1 standard deviations.…”