About Tall or nah

Tall or nah is the world's most powerful height calculator, and it's not even close.

It's an extraordinary claim, but Tall or nah is an extraordinary height calculator. If you read the accuracy statement on the home page, you already know that Tall or nah is powered by a dataset that took 19 years to compile. What you don't know is how that data was collected and processed.

This wasn't 19 years of asking random people on the street how tall they were, or collecting height data on a website that handed out Wayfair coupons. The data behind every Tall or nah calculation originates from 19 cumulative years of data collection that was funded and overseen by the National Center for Health Statistics in the United States.

Every person selected to be measured for height was measured by trained medical professionals using calibrated equipment in controlled environments. To ensure the dataset would ultimately reflect the true demographic diversity of the American population, complex, stratified, multistage probability sampling was used from start to finish.

After all the data points were gathered, the dataset was spliced and smoothed using highly advanced and complex statistical methods—namely, Lambda-Mu-Sigma (LMS). The astonishingly smooth percentile curves produced by the LMS model are the backbone of the Tall or nah calculator. The parsing of the data alone, with all of its unique challenges, was a remarkable achievement in population-based statistical science.

Tall or nah can compute exact percentiles and standard deviation units for every age-sex combination in the United States as young as 2 years old, with remarkable accuracy. What you are accessing here is, in actuality, one of the most authoritative datasets in American pediatric health—don't let the name fool you.

Part of the inspiration to build Tall or nah was to counter the misconceptions surrounding height. Height plays a significant role in shaping social dynamics and personal behavior, often in ways that go unnoticed. It has been a subject of endless curiosity, in romantic relationships, in the workplace, in politics, and even in world conquest.

Yet, there’s a surprising amount of misinformation about what it even means to be "tall". And this is because "tall" has always been defined arbitrarily, often at the whims of the current pop culture. Tall or nah was built to settle the score, by defining "tall" strictly in the languages of mathematics and science, in both a playful and serious way.

Tall or nah was conceived, designed, and built by a tall person.