Why do so many people dislike the word “moist”? This scientist has a theory.

Moist. Moisture. Moist. MOIST.

Do those words make you cringe? If so, you are not alone.

Moist is one of the most hated words in the English language. In 2012, the New Yorker asked its readers on social media what world should be expelled from the language. “In the end, there was a runaway un-favorite: ‘moist,’” the magazine proclaimed.

But why would moist evoke such a reaction? Moisture make so many good things possible: Cake is better not-dry and showers keep us clean. And what about hot tubs? Those are awesome!

For seemingly every burning question the human mind can conceive, there is a bold scientist hungry for an answer. On the question of “moist,” we have that scientist. His name is Paul Thibodeau, and he teaches psychology at Oberlin College.

Recently, Thibodeau published intriguing results in the journal PLOS One that aim to bring some rigor to the “informal speculation about why words like ‘moist’ are aversive on blogs and in the press,” Thibodeau writes me in an email.

His experiments had participants rate a slew of words on several categories, including how aversive and negative the word appeared to participants.

First off, he determined that, yes, moist aversion is a thing: About 18 percent of study participants found displeasure in the word “moist.” Some people are more moist averse than others. “[T]he prototypical moist-averse person is a young, neurotic, female who is well-educated and somewhat disgusted by bodily function,” the study notes.

The tests allowed him to create a relative scale of words we don’t like. He found that participants think “moist” is more pleasant than “fuck” but less pleasant than “gold.” (And to note, he tested the relative dislike of “moist” against some truly heinous words. See the chart above.)

What might be driving the “moist” haters? As he explains on the website The Psych Report:

First... people who scored higher on a measure of disgust toward bodily function were more likely to find “moist” aversive. Second, people who identified as categorically averse to “moist” also found words like “phlegm” and “vomit” more aversive than people who didn’t have a strong unpleasant reaction to “moist.”

In contrast, moist-averse participants were not more sensitive to words that had similar phonological properties to “moist” like “foist,” “hoist,” or “rejoiced” or to words related to sex like “vagina” and “penis.”

In the PLOS One paper he notes that the mystery around “moist” aversion isn’t completely settled.

“It’s worth noting that the word ‘moist’ seems to resonate as aversive more broadly in the general population of American English speakers compared to words that have very similar semantic properties (e.g., damp, wet, sticky),” his study reports. That could be the work of cultural learning: TV shows, social media, and magazines tell us the word “moist” is gross and so we believe it.

Can “moist” ever be redeemed? That’s what People magazine tried to do when they had their “sexiest men alive” say “moist” with panache in a video meant to make this “worst word” sound “hot.”

A writer at Refinery 29 summed up her reaction: “this video is pure sadism. It’s torture, it’s rude, and it’s awful,” she wrote.