A Lexicon for Studying Radicalization in Incel Communities
Emily Klein Jennifer Golbeck
Incels are an extremist online community of men who believe in an ideology
rooted in misogyny, racism, the glorification of violence, and dehumanization.
In their online forums, they use an extensive, evolving cryptolect - a set of
ingroup terms that have meaning within the group, reflect the ideology,
demonstrate membership in the community, and are difficult for outsiders to
understand. This paper presents a lexicon with terms and definitions for common
incel root words, prefixes, and affixes. The lexicon is text-based for use in
automated analysis and is derived via a Qualitative Content Analysis of the
most frequent incel words, their structure, and their meaning on five of the
most active incel communities from 2016 to 2023. This lexicon will support
future work examining radicalization and deradicalization/disengagement within
the community.