incel
12 January 2026
Incel is a portmanteau of involuntary celibate, referring to a person, usually a heterosexual man, who desires a sexual or romantic partner but is unable to find one. The term arose as a self-identifier and spawned a virtual subculture as those who could not find sexual partners reached out for support on the internet. But over the years that subculture and the term itself morphed into one associated with male entitlement to sex and violent misogyny. Ironically, however, the movement was started and the term incel was coined by a bisexual woman, only to be transformed into something quite different than originally envisioned.
In 1997 an anonymous, undergraduate, bisexual woman named Alana at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario created the website Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project. The website is no longer online. That website launch is apparently the first use of the phrase involuntary celibate. She initially used the abbreviation invcel, shortened to conform to the old DOS eight-character limit for filenames, but by 1999 she had switched to incel when a reader suggested that would be easier to pronounce. Sometime between 17 January and 20 April 1999 she posted an article to her site titled “The Incel Movement: What we can learn from the gay rights movement”:
Society does not understand who we are, or have a name for our problem (in fact, straight incels are often assumed to be gay).
This is apparently the earliest use of the portmanteau incel. (The ambiguity in the date is a result of when the Internet Archive took its snapshots of the site. Alana’s web pages did not contain dates of publication.) Alana and the early incarnations of her site are in no way associated with the violent and misogynist nature of the incel movement today.
The phrase involuntary celibacy is much older, however. For instance, there is this from the 7 July 1874 issue of the New York Times:
Mr. GOLDWIN SMITH has stirred up something very like a hornet’s nest by his article on “Female Suffrage” in Macmillan’s Magazine. A correspondent of the Examiner, URSULA M. BRIGHT, is particularly stinging in her comments. She reminds the Professor that there are 800,000 more women than men in Great Britain, and that it is “particularly cruel that women should be taunted with contempt for matrimony by a man who has himself done nothing to reduce, even by one, the overwhelming numbers of those condemned to involuntary celibacy.”
But for years the portmanteau incel remained restricted to various recesses of the internet. The Urban Dictionary added an entry for incel on 12 March 2007, indicating that despite the paucity of its appearances in mainstream publications, the term was alive and well. The entry also shifted the sex from female to male:
incel
involuntary celibate: someone who is celibate but doesn’t want to be
“He’s an incel. He tries to get dates every week but gets turned down all that time.”
It would take misogynistic men with guns to bring awareness of the term incel to the general public. There is this from the McClatchy-Tribune Business News wire service from 26 January 2013:
Clearly, guns offer more protection in fantasy than in reality.
Further, no one needs weapons of war, i.e., military assault rifles for either self-defense or hunting. Their only use is in the service of violent fantasy or actual murder, or of course in a vain effort to feel sufficiently big, strong and masculine.
Recently, the sexual, as well as the angry, violent and misogynist use of guns has been inadvertently highlighted by men who identify with the “incel” (involuntarily celibate) movement, at least four of whom have been among recent mass murderers.
Since then, the term has entered mainstream discourse.
Sources:
Alana. “The Word ‘Incel.’” Love, not Anger (blog), 7 October 2019. Archive.org.
Blum, Lawrence D. “What Guns Really Protect Is a Sense of Manhood.” McClatchy-Tribune Business News, 26 January 2013. ProQuest: Wire Feed.
Bydlowska, Jowita. “The Woman Who Accidentally Started the Incel Movement,” Elle, 1 March 2016.
Donnelly, Denise, et al., “Involuntary Celibacy: A Life Course Analysis,” Journal of Sex Research, 38.2, May 2001, 159–69
New York Times, 7 July 1874, 4/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Urbandictionary.com, 12 March 2007, s.v. incel.