Sources

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".

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).

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.