this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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For Americans who have the height mode of their brain stuck in "Freedom Units":
Anna Smrek is roughly 6' 9"
'Short King' is roughly 5' 3"
...
For data nerds:
Going by total data for the whole globe, all people:
https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile-calculator.php
Anna is ... off the charts, one of if not the actual tallest adult women in the world, literally breaks the calculator.
Anna would be at... the 99.9(8/9)% percentile of men by height, which means that if you use 8.2 billion as a world population, there are at most approximately 1.6 million men as tall or taller than her.
EDIT: I forgor to divide by two, women vs men, so uh, 800k.
===
'Short King' is under the 1st percentile of men (0.77), he is shorter than 99.3%+ of adult men.
'Short King' would be at about the 25th percentile of women by height, which means he is actually still as tall or taller than 25% of women, approximately 2 billion.
EDIT: I did the same forgor /2, so, 1 billion, thanks to FundMECFSResearch for catching my error!
===
Average global male height ~= 178 cm / 5' 10"
Average global female height ~= 165 cm / 5' 5"
...
Possibly also relevant:
https://www.gotquestions.org/how-tall-was-Goliath.html
If you use a more reasonable and realistic measurement of cubits and spans, and go with the Septuagint version of the Old Testament/Torah...
Goliath, the mythical warrior felled by David and his sling, whose name is now just a common euphemism for 'giant'...
Yeah he was only about 6' 6", or about 198 cm.
So...Anna could probably roughly rest her nose on the top of Goliath's head, without bending her neck (or at least not much).
...
Another fun addendum, for I guess dating data nerds?:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886913000020
(If someone can find a more recent study that specifically looks into this, I'd appreciate it!)
Broadly speaking, women prefer taller men more strongly than men prefer shorter women, by a factor of roughly 2.625x.
In Freedom Units, thats roughly women being most satisfied with a man 8 inches taller than them, men being most satisfied with a woman about 3 inches shorter than them.
This means a 5' 10" average guy will tend to be well satisfied with a 5' 7" woman's height, but she will tend to not be well satisfied with the man's height, herself on average, ideally, looking for a 6' 3" man.
Even if it was a 5' 10" man and an [EDIT: Whoops, too many numbers, too fast, this would actually be a somewhat shorter than] average 5' 3" woman, she'd still tend to ideally prefer a 5' 11" man, on average.
So, to more accurately assess 'Short King's realistic dating pool, we actually need to find women who are 8 inches shorter than him.
And that works out to women 4' 7" or shorter.
Which is the 0.02 percentile... meaning that 'Short King's realistic dating pool is at worst, just as small as the number of men who are as tall or taller than Anna.
Or, perhaps both Anna and Short King need to find partners who simply accept them and are satisfied by them via being uncommonly partner-height indifferent.
Good luck to both of them!
there is no way in fuck the global average height for men is 178cm.
~= means approximately equal.
https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile-calculator.php
Going by this, and using 25 as the age, which is my guesstimate for the ages in the OP image, it seems to more precisely be ... 178.4cm.
Do you have an alternate dataset you find to be more accurate?
there's confusing and contradicting language there but it seems to be based on US data.
here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country
... populations of China and India alone are around 170cm on average. I'm too lazy to do the math for the entire world but the two most populous countries by far is a good indicator that the world average should be lower
here https://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/average-height-for-men.htm
it says the world average is about 171cm
The source I am using has options for 'The World' and over 100 countries.
They have a whole section summarzing their data sets, if you scroll down.
In the gigacalculator dataset, the US and World populations do not have the same mean, which indicates they are differentiating between them.
If you are too lazy to do the math yourself, you have no grounds to criticize the source I am using, who are themselves using many, many datasets, who actually have done the math.
Your source, howstuffworks, says its about 171cm, but they also say this varies widely, and the source they use, worlddata.info, does not actually provide a 171cm global mean adult male height anywhere.
Go, click the about to get to howstuffworks' source. There are no given global means at all, they are per country and region.