Sources and further reading

Nothing on this site is original research. These are the people who did the work.

Dictionaries and etymology

• Oxford English Dictionary, entry for fuck, v. (first published in the 1972 Supplement; revised online).
• Jesse Sheidlower, The F-Word, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press, 2009). The standard historical dictionary of the word and its compounds.
• Paul Booth, "An early fourteenth-century use of the F-word in Cheshire, 1310–11", Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. 164 (2015). The Roger Fuckebythenavele discovery.
• Anatoly Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), for the Germanic cognates.
• John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598); Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721); Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785).

Histories of swearing

• Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford University Press, 2013). Best on the shift from religious to sexual oaths.
• Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (Blackwell, 1991).
• Ruth Wajnryb, Language Most Foul (Allen & Unwin, 2004).
• Peter Silverton, Filthy English (Portobello, 2009). Good on Tynan, Grundy and British broadcasting.
• C. H. Rolph (ed.), The Trial of Lady Chatterley (Penguin, 1961). The transcript.

Linguistics

• John J. McCarthy, "Prosodic structure and expletive infixation", Language, vol. 58, no. 3 (1982). The abso-fucking-lutely rule.
• Benjamin K. Bergen, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves (Basic Books, 2016).
• Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (Viking, 2007), chapter 7, "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television".
• Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay, "The sound of swearing: is there a universal pattern in profanity?", Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 30 (2023; published online 2022). The approximant finding.
• John Brophy and Eric Partridge, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914–1918 (Scholartis Press, 1930). The "warning that a noun is coming" observation.

Psychology and neuroscience

• Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, "Swearing as a response to pain", NeuroReport, vol. 20, no. 12 (2009).
• Richard Stephens and Claudia Umland, "Swearing as a response to pain: effect of daily swearing frequency", Journal of Pain, vol. 12, no. 12 (2011). The habituation finding.
• Richard Stephens and Olly Robertson, "Swearing as a response to pain: assessing hypoalgesic effects of novel 'swear' words", Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11 (2020). The "fouch" and "twizpipe" study.
• Emma Byrne, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language (Profile, 2017).
• Timothy Jay, Why We Curse: A Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech (John Benjamins, 2000), and Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz, "The pragmatics of swearing", Journal of Politeness Research, vol. 4 (2008). Source for the children's-acquisition figures.
• Gilad Feldman, Huiwen Lian, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, "Frankly, we do give a damn: the relationship between profanity and honesty", Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 8, no. 7 (2017).
• Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins, "Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, vol. 28, no. 6 (2007).

Law and regulation

• Harvey v Director of Public Prosecutions [2011] EWHC 3992 (Admin).
• Public Order Act 1986, sections 4A and 5, as amended by the Crime and Courts Act 2013.
• Ofcom, Public attitudes towards offensive language on TV and radio (2016) and the 2021 update; The Ofcom Broadcasting Code, section 1.
• Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971); FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).

Photographs

All photographs are public domain or used under a Creative Commons licence, and are served from Wikimedia Commons.

• Title page of Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785. Francis Grose, public domain. Source.
• Title page of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. Samuel Johnson, public domain. Source.
• The west tower of Ely Cathedral. Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source.
• Charles 'Old Hoss' Radbourn in the 1886 Boston Beaneaters team photograph, giving the middle finger to the camera. F. L. Howe, public domain. Source.
• Winston Churchill giving the V for Victory sign, 1943. War Office official photographer, public domain. Source.
• Diogenes sitting in his large jar, painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1860. Jean-Léon Gérôme, public domain. Source.
• D. H. Lawrence, passport photograph, 1929. Unknown (passport office), public domain. Source.
• Portrait of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, crowning a monkey with laurels, by Jacob Huysmans. Jacob Huysmans, public domain. Source.
• James Joyce photographed by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. Alex Ehrenzweig, public domain. Source.
• Portrait of Robert Burns after Alexander Nasmyth. Alexander Nasmyth and John Beugo, public domain. Source.
• Richard Nixon beside stacks of edited White House tape transcripts, April 1974. National Archives and Records Administration, public domain. Source.
• Barack Obama signing the Affordable Care Act, 23 March 2010. Pete Souza, public domain. Source.
• Men of the Lancashire Fusiliers in a trench at Beaumont Hamel, 1 July 1916. Ernest Brooks, public domain. Source.
• Title card of a Private Snafu army training cartoon. Chuck Jones, public domain. Source.
• The Parental Advisory: Explicit Content label. RIAA and BPI, public domain. Source.
• Rage Against the Machine performing live in 2007. Scott Penner, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source.
• George Carlin in 2008. Bonnie, Kendall Park NJ, CC BY 2.0. Source.
• Police booking photograph of Lenny Bruce, 1961. State of Pennsylvania, public domain. Source.
• Geoffrey Chaucer on horseback, from the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. Unknown illuminator, public domain. Source.
• The statue of Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey, London. Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source.
• A common kestrel hovering in the wind. gailhampshire, CC BY 2.0. Source.
• Cover of the 1959 Grove Press unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Grove Press, public domain. Source.
• An Underwood No. 5 typewriter. Unknown, public domain. Source.
• City limit sign of Fucking, Austria. Tobias "ToMar" Maier, CC BY-SA 3.0. Source.
• Medial surface of the human brain, from Gray's Anatomy. Henry Vandyke Carter, public domain. Source.

Icons, diagrams and charts are original to this site.

A note on accuracy

Etymology is contested and popular histories of swearing are full of confidently repeated errors, some of which have probably slipped in here. Where this site says "probably" or "disputed", it means it. If you have a correction with a source, it is welcome.