Moist, squirt and panties are some of the words girls hate most

Moist, squirt and panties have all topped a list of the words girls hate hearing the most. 

Awful terms chunky, curd and flap came up next in the things we can’t stand to hear.

A staggering 77 per cent of girls surveyed admitted Dapper Laugh’s go-to phrase moist among their least favourite words.

And coming in close behind was squirt, with 68 per cent confessing they just couldn’t stand to hear it.

Researchers have put this down to the sexual links making us cringe, not the Bake Off moist link.

Language expert Dr Paul Thibodeau from Oberlin College told Yahoo Health: “The common denominator seems to be disgust, either toward bodily functions or sex.”

A survey of 500 girls by underwear company Knix Wear revealed there are six words we hate the most.

Just over half girls polled – 54 per cent – put panties at the top of their most hated list, while 40 per cent went for chunky, 23 per cent curd and 22 per cent for flap.

But worst of all was moist, which even has a Facebook group dedicated to its hatred.

Meanwhile a poll from Mississippi State University named moist one of the ugliest words in the English language.

Dr Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, explains on his blog Language Log that word aversion is “a feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase”.

This is not because it’s grammatically incorrect, but because “the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting”.

We hate the word moist so much, scientists have even tried to discover why.

Dr Thibodeau and his fellow researchers initially believed that it was the hard “-oist” sound that provoked disgusted reactions,

But they noted in a 2014 study that participants did not have the same response to rhyming words such as ‘hoist’ or ‘foist’.

Experts found that girls especially hated it when it followed vulgar sexual words, but were less grossed out when it came after food-related words, such as cake.

As for the lack of love for panties, Dr Thibodeau believes this has something to do with the weird juxtaposition of the word’s two connotations: one with childhood, the other with – once again – eroticism.

He suggested most people prefer the genderless term underwear.

Next on the list is ‘chunky’ – which is fine, the survey noted, when used as a descriptor for peanut butter – just not for people.

Curd was ranked as a dirty word because it sounds similar to a number of things such as turd, crud and curdle.

For the 22 per cent of people who listed flap as a problem word, Dr Thibodeau believes similarity to the word fap meaning masturbation and the term skin flap cause our hatred.