Statistics
Fuck by the numbers
Counts, rates, rankings and records. Every figure is approximate, most are from a single source, and all are cited on the Sources page.
How much people swear
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Share of everyday spoken words that are swear words | 0.5–0.7% | Jay (2009) |
| Swear words per person per day, average | 80–90 | Jay (2009) |
| Share of all swearing accounted for by ten words | c. 80% | Jay (2009) |
| Share of swearing accounted for by fuck and shit | c. 33–50% | Jay (2009) |
| Swearing rate in British conversation, 1994 corpus | c. 1,100 per million words | Love (2021) |
| Swearing rate in British conversation, 2014 corpus | c. 1,300 per million words | Love (2021) |
| Change in "fuck" forms, 1994 to 2014 | Roughly doubled | Love (2021) |
| Change in "bloody", 1994 to 2014 | Fell by around two-thirds | Love (2021) |
Who swears
| Group | Finding |
|---|---|
| Age | Peak use in the 15–24 group; steady decline through the 60s (both British corpora). |
| Sex | Men swear more overall; the gap halved between 1994 and 2014; women's use of fuck rose faster than men's. |
| Class | Higher rates in lower socio-economic groups in the 1994 data; effect smaller than age and reduced in 2014. |
| Region | Scotland, the north of England and Ireland have the highest rates in most surveys; London and the south-east the lowest, though the differences are modest. |
Ofcom's scale
Ofcom's audience research (2016, updated 2021) grouped words by how offensive British viewers found them. This is the basis for what can be broadcast when.
| Category | Examples | Broadcast position |
|---|---|---|
| Mild | arse, bloody, bugger, crap, damn, git, sod off | Generally acceptable, with some care around children's programmes |
| Medium | arsehole, bollocks, bitch, bullshit, feck, pissed off, shit, tits | Potentially unacceptable before the watershed |
| Strong | bastard, bellend, cocksucker, dickhead, prick, pussy, twat | After the watershed only |
| Strongest | cunt, fuck, motherfucker | After the watershed, with warnings; not before it in any but exceptional circumstances |
The word in print
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Uses in Lady Chatterley's Lover | 30 (counted by the prosecution, 1960) |
| Uses in How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman, 1994) | c. 4,000 |
| Uses in Trainspotting (Welsh, 1993) | c. 700 (estimates vary) |
| Google Books frequency, 1960 to 2019 | Roughly a twenty-fold increase |
| First appearance in the OED | 1972 (Supplement, vol. 1) |
| Years absent from mainstream dictionaries | c. 250 (1721 to 1969) |
Film records
See Film and TV for the full table. Headline figures: Swearnet (2014) 900+; Fuck (2005) 850+; The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) 500–570; Uncut Gems (2019) c. 560; Nil by Mouth (1997) c. 430. Rate rather than count: Deadwood is usually put at about 1.5 per minute, The Wolf of Wall Street at about 3 per minute.
Complaints
Ofcom's annual reports consistently show offensive language as the largest single category of standards complaints, and the word as the most complained-about. The record for a single incident remains the 2005 broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera on BBC Two, which received around 55,000 complaints (mostly organised, mostly about blasphemy) and was widely reported as containing "8,000 swear words", a figure arrived at by multiplying each chorus line by the number of singers.