Countries in the game

Australia, United States, Bangladesh are in or adjacent to today 's puzzle, so their figures are not published on this page. The country pages still explain the studies and the methods; only the numbers are held back.

Read the sample column before the figure. These 23 traceable rows rest on roughly 35,830 measured men in total, but that is distributed very unevenly — the largest study here is over a hundred times the size of the smallest, and a coloured map would give the two identical visual weight.

More importantly, a large part of the spread you are looking at is methodology rather than geography. Studies that press the ruler into the pubic bone record a centimetre or more over studies that do not, on the same man. The methodology page lists the four biggest sources of error, and the guide on measurement technique works through what that does to a ranking.

And the caveat that outranks all of them: the variation between individual men inside any one of these countries is far larger than the gap between any two of them. Nothing on this page says anything about any individual.

Because countries are excluded rather than estimated. Every row here is one metric — clinician-measured stretched length — from one named primary study. Where no such study exists, the country is simply not in the game.

That rule is why this list is 24 countries long instead of 190. The maps that shade every country on Earth are filling the gaps with self-report, marketing surveys and interpolation; the guide on the viral world map traces exactly where those numbers came from.