About 12.6 cm stretched. A 2017 study measured 223 healthy men aged 20 to 77 at Al-Karama Teaching Hospital in Baghdad with a rigid ruler, and did something most national studies never bother with: it published a nomogram, so you can read percentiles rather than a single number. The claim on the map, 13.6 cm, sits a centimetre above it.
The claim runs 1.00 cm above the measurement, and the two do not measure the same thing: the claim says erect, the study measured stretched. There is no accepted way to convert between them.
What was actually measured in Iraq?
The nomogram is the reason this entry is worth a page. A mean on its own tells a reader almost nothing useful, because the question they actually have is where they sit in the distribution. Baghdad published the 50th percentile at 9.0 cm flaccid and 12.5 cm stretched, with the curve either side of it. Only a handful of studies in the entire world literature do this. The Chinese meta-analysis of 34,060 men is another.
The measurements themselves: flaccid 9.8 cm with a standard deviation of 2.0, stretched 12.6 cm with a standard deviation of 1.9. That SD is worth noting, because this site applies a single standard deviation of 1.7 cm to every country on earth and admits it is an assumption. Iraq at 1.9, Egypt at 1.35, Turkey at 1.6, China at 1.63, and Veale's pooled world figure at 1.66 all cluster tightly enough that the assumption survives contact with the data.
The age range is the study's soft spot: 20 to 77 in one pooled mean. Penile length declines with age, so a sample skewed old reads low. Compare Nigeria in this register, where a study split by age reported the older group measuring 3.5 cm larger than the younger one, which is implausible enough to discredit the split rather than support it.
How does that compare with the rest of the world?
The claim puts Iraq 87th of 119 countries on the ranked list. Here is that number set against the figures that come with a method attached.
Figure
cm
What it is
The claim for Iraq
13.60
Labelled erect. No method, no sample size, no reference.
Hussein et al., Arab J Urol
12.60
stretched, 223 men, 2017. The best located
measurement in Iraq.
Clinically measured worldwide
13.12
Erect, 15,521 men. Veale 2015, the pooled clinical figure.
Pooled worldwide
13.93
Erect, 55,761 men. Belladelli 2023, 75 studies.
Pooled for Asia
11.74
Erect, 95 % confidence interval
10.18–13.29 cm
. Belladelli 2023.
That last interval is 3.11 cm wide,
for a whole continent, from the largest meta-analysis there is. The claimed map it sits
under spreads all 119 countries across
7.9 cm and prints every
country to one decimal place. Read those two sentences together and you have the
entire problem with penis size by country.
How many men does the claim cover?
223 measured → 12,000,000 described
223 men in Iraq appear in the studies this register could locate. The claimed figure is applied to roughly 12,000,000 adult men: one measured man for every 53,812.
Where would you land in Iraq?
Against the claimed figure, because that is the number people mean when they ask. It
is the weaker of the two numbers above, and the calculator says so. Everything is
computed in your browser and nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
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1,350,250,000men smaller
1,350,240,000men larger
50 of 100 men worldwide are larger than you.
L 13.6 cm
Estimated from the claimed world mean of 13.6 cm across ≈ 2,700,490,000 adult
men in 119 countries. You beat the claimed mean in 31 of them. The
claims are the internet's, not ours; we are grading them one by one.
See the audit.
What should you take from this?
Iraq has a real, readable, competently reported study, and the number the internet prints for Iraq is not from it. That combination is the most common finding in this entire audit: the study exists, and the claim ignored it.
A nomogram beats an average every time. If you want to know where you land rather than how you compare with a national mean, the pooled clinical percentile curves in Veale 2015 are built for exactly that.
Nearby in the register
The nearest countries with an entry of their own here.
Nearer still, and with nothing to show: Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan. Those
countries carry a claimed figure on every map and no located study behind it, so they
have no page here. The method page lists all of them.
Sources for this page
Hussein et al., Arab J Urol, 2017, n = 223. Clinician-measured with a rigid ruler, flaccid and stretched.
Study
Veale D et al. Am I normal? BJU International 2015; 115(6): 978–986. The pooled
clinical figures used throughout this site.
Belladelli F et al. Worldwide Temporal Trends in Penile Length. World J Mens Health
2023; 41(4). The regional pooled figures and confidence intervals.
The full reference list, the grading scheme and all 119 claims are on the
method and sources page.