TikTok has a new question: Can your boyfriend read?

First, TikTok wanted to know whether your boyfriend would peel an orange for you.

Then, whether he cared that you saw a bird.

Now, users on the app have arrived at a more fundamental question: Can your boyfriend read? In the latest relationship trend spreading across TikTok, women hand their boyfriends or husbands lists of words and ask them to read each one aloud.

The lists vary, but each version includes words that are tricky to pronounce based on their spelling, yet common enough that most adults would recognize them: "epitome," "hyperbole," "colonel," "quinoa," and "niche," among others.

Then the boyfriends have a go — and, in many of the videos, get nearly all of them wrong.

And viewers have found it increasingly difficult to blame every answer on the English language being notoriously quirky.

"This trend has unearthed a fear of mine that I didn’t know existed before this past week," creator Isabella Von Ghoul said in a response video, adding: "The state has failed your man, and I’m scared." Influencer Christina Najjar, also known as Tinx, asked women, "Why are you guys boasting that your boyfriends can’t read?" and creator Daniel Bennett was even more direct: "In the videos, the girlfriends are giggling.

But we aren’t laughing with you.

We’re laughing at you." This Tweet is currently unavailable.

It might be loading or has been removed.

On Reddit, where a post asking “Why can’t Gen Z read?” attracted hundreds of comments, some users viewed the sheer number of boyfriend videos as evidence of a generational problem.

Many on X encouraged girlfriends to "either dump or immediately begin to get [your boyfriends] to start educating themselves." The reaction reflects a larger conversation that had already been building online before the challenge emerged.

Earlier this summer, viewers treated the vocabulary of the Love Island USA Season 8 cast as evidence that America’s literacy crisis had reached the villa.

Islanders mispronounced words, mixed up common expressions, and, in one episode, even floated using ChatGPT to help write a love letter.