both sexes have 24 ribs (a set of 12). A very small amount of people have 22 or 26 ribs, (en extra set, or a missing set) at birth. The idea that women or men have more ribs than the other is a crackpot idea based upon the story of how Adam gave Eve a rib therefore she must have an extra or he must have grown an extra. Totally preposterous. Each sex has the exact same vital organs (kidneys, lungs heart etc.) therefore we have the same ribcage to protect them.
The simple way to test whether men and women have different numbers of ribs would be to ask all the people who want to know, to dig up their own chest X-rays. Let anyone who wants, count the ribs without knowing whose is whose (though female X-rays do show breasts, much of the time). See whether there's any correlation between the number of ribs counted, and the sex of the person X-rayed. The exact number is less important than the fact that most chest X-rays will show the same number of ribs on each side of the body.
All God's chillun got twelve ribs, Bob. The origin of the Adam's rib story isn't known for sure, but some think it may stem from a Sumerian joke.
Here's the dope: the Sumerians had a myth about a consortium of gods who were busily turning the land of Dilmun into a paradise when one of their number, Enki the water-god, committed a breach of etiquette by nibbling on a newly-created plant. Ninhursag, the earth-goddess, put a curse on Enki, and he fell ill as eight of his vital organs failed. Ninhursag was eventually persuaded to relent, but to cure Enki she had to create eight different new deities to cure each of Enki's ailing organs.
The story bears some resemblance to, and in fact may have been the inspiration for, the Hebrew story of Genesis: the creation, the eating of the forbidden fruit, etc. But here's where it gets really interesting: the Hebrew name "Eve" means, approximately, "she who makes live." In Sumerian, the word for "make live" is ti, which is also the Sumerian word for "rib."
Thus, the name of the goddess created to cure Enki's aching rib, "Nin-Ti," may have been a Sumerian pun, meaning both "The Lady of the Rib" and "The Lady Who Makes Live." The joke was lost when the story--itself much altered--entered the Hebrew tradition, leaving only the enigmatic association of Eve and Adam's rib.
As for spare ribs--known as "sparribs" in the relatively terse seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--they take their name from the Middle Low German word "rippspeer," which eventually became "ribbesper." It was the custom of the Middle Low Germans to sit around their fires roasting pig ribs on a spit or, as they preferred to call it, a "sper" (a word that survives in English as "spar," as in the rib supports of a ship).
Somewhere in the sixteenth century, the two elements of the German word became transposed as it entered English--"ribbesper" became "sparrib." As time marched on, the excessively literal English insisted on disconnecting the "spar," thinking it came from the adjective "spare." Thus another boneheaded blunder became part of the English language, confusing you and keeping guys like me in business.
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