I have synesthesia. More specifically, ordinal linguistic personification. No, I did not make up this term or condition. If you would like to read all about it, check out this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_linguistic_personification

It was 4 years ago and I was reading this LifeHacker article about synesthesia. It explained how most people do not even know they have it. This was me. I did not know. I guess I assumed this was just a(nother) weird quirk of mine.

For me, numbers, letters, and colors have a gender. There’s a bit of a personality to them as well, but nothing well-formed like the examples in the Wikipedia article. These genders have not changed at all in my life, meaning they are truly a marker of synesthesia. I’m not sure when this started. I do remember being mad in kindergarten because The Letter People were the wrong gender.

Do you have ordinal linguistic personification or another synesthesia? Do you even know? Something to think about!

Below is the list of my genders for the basic numbers/letters/colors. Some larger numbers have a gender too, but that would take a while to list them all. And you probably don’t want to read all that either!

Numbers

1. male
2. female
3. female
4. male
5. female
6. female
7. male
8. female
9. female
10. male

Letters

• A = female
• B = male
• C = male
• D = male
• E = male
• F = male
• G = male
• H = female
• I = male
• J = male
• K = female
• L = male
• M = female
• N = female
• O = male
• P = male
• Q = male
• R = female
• S = male
• T = male
• U = male
• V = male
• W = male
• X = male
• Y = male
• Z = male

Colors

• Blue = male
• Green = female
• Red = female
• Yellow = male
• Orange = male
• Black = male
• Brown = male
• Pink = female
• Purple = female
• White = female