Timeline
Seven centuries of the F-word
The key dates. Where a date is disputed or approximate, it says so.
- c. 1278
A "John le Fucker" is said to appear in an English record. Widely repeated, never reliably verified. Treat with suspicion.
- 1310
Roger Fuckebythenavele is named in the Chester county court plea rolls, repeatedly, while being outlawed. The earliest secure evidence of the word.
- c. 1475
The poem Flen flyys hides "fuccant uuiuys of heli" in a letter-shift cipher. First use of the word as a word, and proof that it was already unprintable.
- c. 1503
William Dunbar uses "fukkit" openly in a Scots poem. Scots poetry was, for a while, considerably franker than English.
- 1528
A monk in Bristol writes "O d fuckin Abbot" in the margin of Cicero's De Officiis. The first recorded use of "fucking" as pure abuse.
- 1598
John Florio's A Worlde of Wordes lists "to fucke" as a plain English gloss for the Italian fottere.
- 1721
Nathan Bailey includes the word in his dictionary. It will be the last mainstream English dictionary to do so for about 250 years.
- 1755
Samuel Johnson omits it. Respectability sets in.
- 1785
Francis Grose prints "f**k" in the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. The asterisk era begins.
- 1914–45
Two world wars spread the word through millions of servicemen. "Snafu" and "fubar" enter the language.
- 1933
A US federal court rules that James Joyce's Ulysses is not obscene, opening the door to frank language in serious fiction.
- 1948
Norman Mailer's publisher makes him write "fug" throughout The Naked and the Dead.
- 1960
Penguin Books is acquitted at the Old Bailey over Lady Chatterley's Lover. The word appears in a mass-market British paperback.
- 1965
Kenneth Tynan says it live on the BBC, 13 November. Four Commons motions follow.
- 1969
The American Heritage Dictionary becomes the first major modern American dictionary to include it.
- 1971
Cohen v. California: the US Supreme Court rules that wearing "Fuck the Draft" in a courthouse is protected speech. Justice Harlan: "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."
- 1972
The Oxford English Dictionary publishes the entry at last, in its Supplement. George Carlin records the "Seven Words" routine.
- 1976
The Sex Pistols swear at Bill Grundy on live teatime television. "The Filth and the Fury", says the Daily Mirror.
- 1978
FCC v. Pacifica: the US Supreme Court upholds the regulator's power to restrict Carlin's routine on daytime radio.
- 1994
Four Weddings and a Funeral opens with the word repeated about a dozen times and becomes the highest-grossing British film to that date.
- 2009
Richard Stephens at Keele University shows that swearing increases tolerance of pain. The study wins an Ig Nobel Prize the following year.
- 2011
In Harvey v DPP the High Court in London rules that swearing at police officers, who hear the word constantly, does not on its own amount to harassment, alarm or distress.
- 2021
Ofcom's audience research still places the word in its "strongest" category. The Austrian village of Fucking, tired of stolen road signs, renames itself Fugging.