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's the number urology studies report, because a clinician can take it with a ruler in a consulting room. It doesn't rely on self-report, which inflates figures substantially and unevenly. And it tracks erect length closely enough to serve as 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 wouldn't make the game bigger so much as make it meaningless in a way the player can't see. 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 citation isn't the same as knowing what a study did. Two papers can both say “stretched length, measured by a clinician” and mean quite different things. One recruits nineteen-year-old conscripts, another fifty-three-year-old urology patients, a third men queuing at a circumcision clinic. Those differences move the number by more than any plausible difference between the populations themselves.

So where a study's design has been checked against the paper, the country page carries a short written account of it: who was measured, how they were recruited, and the specific reason that figure could be wrong. Some of what that turns up is uncomfortable for the row it sits under. The French figure is the highest in the game largely because the 1992 study recorded the longest of three successive stretches on a clinical population with a mean age of 53, using a technique other researchers have criticised in print. The Vietnamese figure rests on the largest sample here by an order of magnitude, and every one of those men was attending an andrology clinic. Both belong on the page.

These notes are written from the papers, one country at a time, and never generated. A country with no note is one whose study design hasn't been verified yet, not one with nothing to say about it. An empty space is honest. A plausible-sounding paragraph assembled from summaries of summaries would quietly poison the one thing this site is for. Notes go up as each paper gets checked.

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 much rather hear it. 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, you included. 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.

A country earns a row here only if someone measured a sample of men in it, with a ruler, and published the stretched length. That bar excludes far more countries than it admits, and the list is short because the literature is short — not because the search stopped early.

The three most obvious candidates for expansion all fail it, and fail it in instructive ways. A 2015 cohort of 778 men in Saudi Arabia is a genuinely good study, but it measured erect length after an intracavernosal injection, and mixing erect figures into a stretched-length table would break the one rule that makes these countries comparable at all. A 2018 Japanese paper does report stretched length, but from 41 men about to undergo radical prostatectomy — a sample chosen for a treatment question, not a population one. A 2001 German study measured 111 men, erect, by self-stimulation, as part of research into condom fit.

Each of those would have added a country to the map. None of them would have added a comparable number. A world map with more countries on it is not a better map if the extra countries were measured a different way, and the single-metric rule above is worth more than the coverage it costs.

Adding a country means finding a study, not filling a gap. Several large, heavily researched countries are missing from the rotation, and not for want of research. What got published was erect or flaccid length, or a pre- and post-surgical delta, rather than a baseline stretched mean.

That accounts for the size of the rotation entirely. If your country isn't 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 counts plain centimetres off rather than a percentage: a guess within 0.15 cm wins. Warmth shows up 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 raises an obvious problem: they could be used to look up the day's answer.

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

Dickle publishes population averages from medical literature for general interest and education. It isn't a diagnostic tool, it can't tell you anything about your own body, and it doesn't substitute for a clinician.

If something about your body is worrying you, whether a change, a lump, pain, or persistent distress about your appearance, take it to a doctor. Distress about penis size in men of entirely normal anatomy is common, well documented, and treatable, and the treatments that work aren't the ones advertised to you.

The compilation is free to reuse with attribution: a link back to Dickle and, where you can, to the underlying study. There is no fee, no registration, and no restriction on commercial use of it.

What is offered is the compilation and its provenance, not the figures themselves. Each number was published by somebody else, in a paper that keeps its own rights, and a compilation cannot relicense its sources. If you are quoting a single country's figure, cite the study named on that country's page rather than citing us for it; we are the index, not the measurement.

One request rather than a condition. If you republish a figure, carry the measurement method with it. Nearly every wrong number in circulation on this subject started as a correct number that got separated from the method that produced it.

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

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