Gaydar

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈɡeɪdɑː/

Definitions

1. The capacity to sense or identify a person's sexual orientation through subtle cues or behaviors
2. A casual reference to the intuition or insight one possesses regarding another's sexual identity
3. An intuitive skill for recognizing someone's sexuality based on indirect signals

Etymology: Gaydar is a blend of "gay" and "radar," and the radar half carries the joke. Radar was a wartime technology that detected unseen objects by bouncing signals off them, so the coinage imagines an uncanny sense that picks up signals from people without anyone speaking. The blend follows the pattern of earlier clipped and combined words, and the OED records it as a blend of "gay" and "radar." The word's central image is one of detection. Someone with good gaydar senses, intuitively, that another person is gay, and the metaphor treats sexual orientation as a signal to be received rather than a fact to be declared. That is why the word is usually used with a sense of guesswork, since the reading is an inference from faint cues rather than certain knowledge. The "-dar" ending is a clipping of "radar," so it is a suffix in function, not a separate word with its own history. The "gay" element has a longer history, but the blend itself is a modern formation built from those two parts.