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Incel, is short for '''involuntarily celibate''', a term describing a life circumstance.  'Involuntarily celibate' is a [[Donnolly Study#Incel is Now a Valid Academic Sociological Term|valid academic sociological term]] proposed by [[Alana]] and popularized in academia by the [[Donnolly Study]], referring to people who would like to have a sexual or romantic partner but can't find one for 6 months or more legally, and then remain celibate.  The date may seem arbitrary, but there had to be a cutoff point, and Denise Donnolly chose 6 months as that factored in that some sexually active people go weeks without sex, and people start to worry about their sex lives after a certain period of time longer than that period.  The only reason that incels or incelibates use an abbreviated form of the longer term is that "incel" has only two syllables, thus is easier to say. "Incelibate" has four syllables, again easy to say. In contrast, the term  "involuntarily celibate person" has 11 syllables, which is much harder to say. Therefore the term "incel" is to "involuntary celibate" the same thing as what "lb" is to "pound". "Incelibate" is to "involuntarily celibate" the same as what "USA" is to the "United States of America". Just because a longer term is abbreviated doesn't mean that the definition has changed. So in a nutshell, "incel" is simply an abbreviation of the term "involuntarily celibate".