Methodology

Dickle is played on stretched penile length — the flaccid penis extended to its full length and measured from the pubic bone to the tip. Every figure in the game is that measurement and nothing else.

It looks like an odd choice until you look at the literature. It is the number urology studies actually report, because a clinician can take it with a ruler in a consulting room; it does not depend on self-report, which inflates figures substantially and unevenly; and it tracks erect length closely enough to be the standard clinical stand-in.

The pooled worldwide mean for this measure is 12.93 cm (5.09 in), from Belladelli et al., World J Mens Health, 2023 (55,761 men). That figure is the anchor the reveal screen compares each country against.

Every row in the dataset is a stretched length. Countries that have only an erect figure published are excluded on purpose, even when the study is large and good.

Dropping that rule would roughly double the country list overnight. It would also break three things at once. The daily answer would partly depend on which method a researcher happened to use rather than on the country. The “versus the worldwide average” line would be comparing an erect figure against a stretched-length pool. And the rank stat would be ranking methodologies as much as populations.

Erect figures also skew high, because a larger share of them are self-induced or self-reported. Mixing them in would not make the game bigger; it would make it meaningless in a way that is invisible to the player. We took the smaller list.

Every country in the game names a primary study, and the reveal screen prints it to the player: the authors, the journal, the year, how many men were measured, and the method. Rows are drawn from peer-reviewed urology literature — European Urology, BJU International, the International Journal of Impotence Research, Andrologia, the Journal of Urology and others.

23 of the 24 countries currently in the game are backed by a traceable primary study, covering roughly 35,830 measured men in total. Sample sizes per country range from about fifty to over fourteen thousand, which is a spread of confidence a single coloured map could never show you.

A row with a sample size of zero is one where a figure circulates widely but we could not find the primary study behind it. It renders as “no primary study traced” on the reveal screen instead of borrowing credibility from the rows around it.

There is currently 1 such row in the dataset. If you can point us at the primary source for one, or show that no such source exists, we would rather hear it than not — see contact.

None of these are hypothetical. All four are visible in the dataset if you read the method field on the reveal screen.

The single most important caveat on this site, and the one a ranked list is structurally incapable of showing: the spread between individual men inside any one country is far larger than the gap between any two national averages.

Knowing a man's nationality tells you close to nothing about him. Every figure here is a population average and none of it says anything about any individual, including you. If you take one thing from this page, take that.

The guide on measurement technique works through this in detail, and the one on the viral world map covers what happens when a chart ignores it.

Adding a country means finding a study, not filling a gap. Several large, heavily researched countries are missing from the rotation not because nobody has studied them, but because what was published was erect or flaccid length, or a pre- and post-surgical delta, rather than a baseline stretched mean.

That is the entire reason the rotation is the size it is. If your country is not in the game, the answer is almost always the most boring sentence in science: nobody has published the measurement.

The published figures sit in a narrow band, so scoring is plain centimetres off rather than a percentage: a guess within 0.25 cm wins. Warmth is shown as one of five coarse tiers rather than an exact distance, because an exact distance plus the higher-or-lower hint would let a player invert the scoring and win on the second guess every time.

The country changes at each player's local midnight. Progress and streaks live in your own browser and are never uploaded — see privacy.

The countries and archive pages publish figures, which creates an obvious problem: they could be used to look up the day's answer.

They cannot. The figure for whichever country is currently in play is withheld from every statically rendered page, and because the game rolls over at each player's local midnight while these pages are shared by everyone, the window covers yesterday, today and tomorrow in UTC. Archive entries are published two days in arrears for the same reason. Knowing the other countries' figures tells you nothing about the one that is hidden.

Dickle publishes population averages from medical literature for general interest and education. It is not a diagnostic tool, it cannot tell you anything about your own body, and it is not a substitute for a clinician.

If something about your body is worrying you — a change, a lump, pain, or persistent distress about your appearance — that is worth taking to a doctor. Distress about penis size in men of entirely normal anatomy is common, well documented, and treatable, and the treatments that work are not the ones advertised to you.

If a figure looks clearly wrong, or you can point us at a better primary study for a country, email flaviuscojocaru19@gmail.com. Corrections are applied to the dataset and take effect across the game and every reference page at once.

The study, year, sample size and method are printed next to every figure the site publishes, so you can always see exactly how much weight a number is carrying.