Bodily Oddities

Cloverleaf tongue

Also called: Trefoil tongue · Three-leaf tongue

Folding the tongue into three lobes, like a clover leaf. Between 10% and 15% of people in Western samples can do it. It is usually called the hardest tongue shape.

Mouth and throat Muscle Trick Voluntary
Try it Learnable Party trick Genetic

How common

10–15% (Western samples) Common · 10–50% A Chinese sample found 0%. The difference between populations appears large.

Can you do this?

These are answers from visitors, not a study.

How it works

A cloverleaf tongue has three bumps. The two side edges curl up, as in tongue rolling, and the tip also folds up in the middle. Seen from the front, the tongue looks like a clover leaf with three lobes.

The shape needs two movements at the same time. The crosswise muscles inside the tongue pull the sides up2. The lengthwise muscles on top pull the tip up and back2. Most people who can roll their tongue cannot add the second fold.

Between 10% and 15% of people in Western samples can make the shape1. One Chinese study found nobody in its sample who could1. This suggests the ability varies a lot between populations. A dominant genetic component is likely1. Genes are not the whole story. Some people learn the shape by watching others and copying the movement.

No formal studies exist on how many people can learn it with practice.

Try it

  1. Roll your tongue into a tube first. If you cannot roll it, the cloverleaf is very unlikely.
  2. Keep the sides curled up. Now try to lift the tip of the tongue up in the middle, so that a third bump forms.
  3. Look in a mirror. Three lobes in a row is the target.
  4. If you get two lobes and a flat middle, keep practising. Small daily attempts work better than long sessions.

History and culture

The cloverleaf is a common challenge in online tongue-trick videos3. It is usually listed as the hardest of the standard tongue shapes.

Sources and further material

  1. Encyclopedia Tongue rolling Covers the cloverleaf fold alongside other tongue shapes.
  2. Encyclopedia Tongue Anatomy of the tongue muscles.
  3. Video Cloverleaf tongue demonstration YouTube search.
Mouth Trick

Tongue rolling

Between 65% and 84% of people can curl the sides of the tongue up into a tube. For decades it was taught as a simple one-gene trait. It is not.

65–84% of people
Mouth Trick

Tongue folding

Folding the tip of the tongue backward over itself inside the mouth. Between 14% and 27.5% of people can do it.

14–27.5%
Mouth Trick

Tongue twisting

Turning the tongue on its side so the edges face up and down, or all the way over. Between 12% and 36% of people can twist it at least halfway.

12–36%
Mouth Trick

Khechari mudra

A hatha yoga practice in which the tongue is turned back and up behind the soft palate, into the space at the back of the nose. Very few people can do it without months or years of stretching.

Very rare without training