Fluent in Misogyny: Developing a Domain-Specific Dictionary for Dehumanization in Incel Communities

Involuntary celibates (incels) congregate in online hateful communities organized around perceived sexual and romantic exclusion. Their discourse includes a lexicon of dehumanizing terms that is not well captured by existing dictionaries. This study developed an incel-specific dehumanization dictionary using manually coded training and validation datasets, and applied it to approximately 3.1 million forum comments. The new dictionary improved detection accuracy and showed stronger associations with violent extremist discourse than established dehumanization dictionaries. Incel-specific dehumanizing language was also more prevalent among longer-tenured and higher-volume users. These findings highlight how dehumanization functions as a structured linguistic practice within these subcultures.