A Gap Between Your Front Teeth
A gap between the two front teeth — diastema, medically — is read across English-language folk tradition as a sign of luck, wealth, or a love of travel, while several West African traditions treat it as an outright mark of beauty and good fortune, a genuinely positive reversal of how the trait is often treated as a cosmetic flaw in Western contexts today.
Traceable origin
Earliest known record: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (14th century) describes the Wife of Bath as having a gap between her front teeth and explicitly connects it to a lustful, fortunate temperament, according to medieval physiognomic belief of the period
Chaucer's reference is a genuinely dateable, named literary citation for the gap-tooth-as-fortune-marker belief in English tradition, making this one of the more solidly traceable body-sign beliefs on the site, even though the belief's exact folk origins likely predate Chaucer's own written reference to it.
A rare case with a named medieval author attached
Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written in the late 14th century, describes the Wife of Bath as gap-toothed and explicitly links the trait to her bold, fortunate, and sensual character, drawing directly on the medieval physiognomic belief that a person's features revealed their temperament and fate. That's an unusually solid, dated, named citation for a body-sign belief — far more concrete than the vague "widely believed across Britain" framing most folklore on this site has to settle for — even though the underlying folk association likely existed in spoken tradition before Chaucer wrote it down.
Admired outright, not just tolerated, in West African tradition
It's worth being precise about the difference in valence here: the English tradition reads the gap as a marker attached to luck or personality, which is positive but still framed as an interesting SIGN rather than a straightforwardly desirable physical feature in its own right. West African tradition, by contrast, treats a gapped smile as a genuinely admired aesthetic trait on its own terms — beautiful, charming, sometimes specifically sought after — which is a meaningfully different kind of positive reading than "this trait predicts good luck."
A trait caught between two contradictory modern impulses
The same physical feature sits at an interesting modern crossroads: Western orthodontic culture has, for decades, generally treated a gap between the front teeth as a cosmetic flaw worth correcting, even while the older folk tradition running underneath that same culture reads the identical gap as lucky. Meanwhile, in the traditions where the gap is admired outright as beauty, there's no equivalent pull toward correcting it. That tension — inherited folklore reading a trait as fortunate while contemporary dental cosmetics treats the same trait as something to fix — is a genuinely interesting case of an old folk belief and a newer cultural standard pulling in different directions within the same broad culture.
The medical picture
Diastema is a common, usually harmless dental spacing variation with multiple possible causes (tooth size, jaw size, a labial frenum attachment, or habits like thumb-sucking in childhood); it requires no treatment unless a person chooses cosmetic correction or unless it's linked to an underlying dental issue worth addressing.
What Different Cultures Say
In Nigeria and several other West African cultures, a gap between the front teeth (sometimes called "ipenu" in Yoruba contexts) is widely regarded as a mark of beauty and charm, admired specifically rather than treated as a flaw to be corrected, and is documented as a preference some people have even sought through cosmetic means.
American folk tradition reads the gap as a sign of luck, sometimes specifically tied to financial fortune or a strong wanderlust, echoing the older English tradition while existing in tension with modern orthodontic culture's tendency to treat the same gap as a flaw to be corrected.
British folk tradition carries the Chaucer-era reading forward most directly, associating a gapped smile with a fortunate, passionate, or well-traveled nature, tracing a continuous line from medieval literary physiognomy into more casual modern folk speech.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Chaucer reference the earliest known mention of this belief anywhere?+
It's the earliest well-documented, named literary citation in English tradition specifically; the underlying folk association may well be older in spoken tradition, but the Canterbury Tales passage is the earliest written source scholars typically point to.
Do people in West African traditions that admire the trait ever seek to create the gap cosmetically?+
Yes — there are documented cases of people seeking cosmetic dental work specifically to create or widen a gap where it doesn't naturally occur, a striking contrast to Western cosmetic dentistry's more common goal of closing the same gap.
Does the gap-tooth belief specify which luck it predicts, the way some finger- or side-based beliefs on this site do?+
The English-language tradition is fairly loosely specified — wealth, luck, travel, and a passionate nature are all cited in different tellings — without one single fixed prediction the way, say, an itchy palm's money reading is stated with more precision.