A Brief History of the Most Famous Swear Word in the World

In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.

There’s a good chance you have some story about your relationship to the word fuck. You asked a teacher what it meant; you used it inap­propriately in a professional situation; you were thrilled to learn a story about its origin (probably false—see “Where It’s Not From,” below); you were disciplined by a parent or guardian for saying it; you discov­ered that a romantic partner liked—or really did not like—hearing it, or used it in a way that had a strong effect on you.

How has this word, which has been around for many hundreds of years, maintained both its intense interest and its uncommon power?

There is no simple answer to this question; too many factors come into play. Sex is certainly one factor. The vast majority of uses of fuck in modern English are nonsexual, but it has retained its sexual meanings and connotations across many centuries, and sex is something that’s always hovering around our consciousness. The word has amassed a great many other uses, though, and so the reasons for its singular force and appeal are likewise diverse and complex.

Fuck has an enormous range of uses across many parts of speech, as this dictionary details: sexual and nonsexual, positive and negative, literal and figurative, funny and violent. For any situation, there’s prob­ably some sense, some expression or catchphrase, some proverb, some intonation that can be brought to the table.

And it just feels good to say. It feels good in the mouth, giving shape to catharsis; it can also feel good in the brain, satisfying a strong emotional need or a desire for personal expression. It can help us bond with peers, gain or direct attention, persuade listeners, and establish or test intimacy.

Psycholinguistic research shows that using certain kinds of swear words can even improve the body’s physical strength and resistance to pain. (But the more you swear in daily life, the smaller the analgesic effect.)

Words such as fuck are often criticized for being “bad,” or we are told that we should avoid them. But what is appropriate depends on context—and sometimes we want to be inappropriate. This word is an important part of our culture, our vocabulary, and our heritage, and that is always something worth knowing more about.

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Etymology: Where It’s From

The word fuck is of Germanic origin. It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings like “to strike” or “to move back and forth.” The English word is the earliest recorded member of this family, but this does not imply that the other languages borrowed the form from English; rather, the words are all cognate.

Ultimately these words are members of a group of loosely related verbs having the structural form f plus a short vowel plus a stop (a consonant such as k, d, g, or t, in which the flow of air from the mouth is briefly inter­rupted), often with an l or r somewhere in between. These words have the basic meaning “to move back and forth,” and often the figurative sense “to cheat.” English examples of this family—all arriving later than fuck—are fiddle, fidget, flit, flip, flicker, and frig.

Fuck has no connection to some superficially similar words in other languages—Latin futuere, and its French derivative foutre. Though the Latin word is vulgar and means “to copulate,” it is almost certainly not related to fuck. Theories attempting to tie fuck to words in other lan­guages, sometimes via a proposed Indo-European root meaning “to strike,” are possible, but for now remain uncertain.

Nor is fuck an “Anglo- Saxon” word—that term refers to the earliest period of English (now called Old English by scholars), before around 1100 A.D., and fuck is simply not found this early.

There are various claims that certain words in Middle English repre­sent early examples of fuck, but these are usually unlikely. For example, Carl Darling Buck, in his 1949 Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, cited a 1278 example of the name “John le Fucker.”

But he did not cite the source of this name, and no one has found a reference to it. More important, even if the source is authentic, there are many other possibilities for the name (the word fulcher “soldier,” or a misreading of the name Tucker, are the most likely).

However, if the bird name windfucker noun (or fuckwind noun) is ultimately related to fuck, it is interesting to note the name Ric Wyndfuk and Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous, found from 1287 in documents related to Sherwood Forest, which may show another form of the bird name. Use of the word in the sense “to strike” could per­haps also be reflected by the surname Fuckebegger (also 1287); com­pare the Anglo-Norman surname Butevilein (literally “strike the churl or wretch”), found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Two recent discoveries have changed our understanding of the word’s earliest history in English. The historian Paul Booth found court records from Cheshire in 1310 and 1311 concerning a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele, who was charged with a serious (though unspecified) criminal offense.

As authorities tried to appre­hend him, his name entered the records several times over the course of many months, showing that this was a real name rather than a one-off joke. The most plausible interpretation would seem to be sexual, with Roger either believing that copulation should be done through or next to a partner’s navel, or having attempted such an act.

And in 1373, a charter from Bristol gives us an unusual placename: a field called Fockynggroue, i.e. “Fucking Grove.” While there are other interpretations, “a grove where one copulates” is the most likely, and is supported by various parallels.

Early evidence for our word is relatively slight, and may have more than one explanation. One possibility is simply that the word isn’t much older, that it was a new development in the fourteenth and fif­teenth centuries. The usual Middle English word for sexual intercourse was swive—itself considered vulgar—and fuck could have arisen to take its place as that word became more rare.

The most likely possi­bility for fuck, however, is that the word carried a taboo so strong that it was rarely written down in the Middle Ages. The fact that its earliest known non-proper-name appearance in English, around 1475, is obscured by a cipher lends support to this interpretation.

Since many of the earliest examples of the F-word come from Scottish sources, some scholars have suggested that it is a Norse borrowing, Norse having had a much greater influence on northern and Scottish varieties of English than on southern dialects.

But the fourteenth-century examples, the 1475 ciphered use, and the 1528 example of “O d [probably damned] fuckin Abbot” (at fucking, adj., sense 1) are all from England, proving that fuck was not restricted to Scotland in its earliest days. The profusion of early examples in Scotland is probably because the taboo against the word was less strong there.

(The 1528 quotation, found in a marginal note to a manuscript—that common source of bawdy jokes—has been referred to repeatedly in popular ar­ticles as the first use of fuck, despite the many earlier examples.)

Taboos against particular words or types of speech are not new. There is ample evidence from the earliest times in England that cer­tain forms of speech were restricted. As far back as the seventh century, there are records of a law from Kent reading “If anyone in another’s house…shamefully accosts him with insulting words, he is to pay a shilling to him who owns the house.”

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Where It’s Not From

The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think. Acronyms are extremely rare before the 1930s, and etymologies of this sort—especially for older words—are almost al­ways false. (Posh does not come from “Port Outward, Starboard Home,” cop is not from “Constable On Patrol,” and tip is not from “To Insure Promptness.”)

To this editor’s knowledge, the earliest sugges­tion of an acronymic etymology for fuck appears to be in the New York underground newspaper The East Village Other, on February 15, 1967:

It’s not commonly known that the word “fuck” originated as a medical diagnostic notation on the documents of soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier reported sick and was found to have V.D., the abbreviation F.U.C.K. was stamped on his documents. It was short for “Found Under Carnal Knowledge.”

The more usual variant along these lines is “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” abbreviated to fuck and allegedly worn on a badge by convicted adulterers, rapists, or prostitutes in some mythical Olden Tymes; other variants include “Found in Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (specifically for adulterers) and “Forced Unsolicited Carnal Knowledge” (for rapists).

(The publi­cation of a play in 1965 titled “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” led to a controversy when the University of California, Berkeley, tried to ban its sale; but the play seems not to have suggested that the phrase was the true origin of fuck.)

The other common acronym is “Fornication Under Consent of the King,” said to have been some form of royal license, often specifically to repopulate the country after a plague. This variant is first found in the May 1970 issue of Playboy:

My friend claims that the word fuck originated in the fifteenth Century, when a married couple needed permis­sion from the king to procreate. Hence, Fornication Under Consent of the King. I maintain that it’s an acronym of a law term used in the 1500s that referred to rape as Forced Unnatural Carnal Knowledge.

When acronymic origins are suggested, the original phrase usually sounds artificial, not like some real phrase that would be common enough to be abbreviated. “For unlawful carnal knowledge,” how­ever, has the ring of a stilted legal expression.

In fact, “unlawful carnal knowledge” has appeared in legal sources for some time. It was used in definitions of rape under English Common Law, can be found in Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and is present in Northern Ireland’s current statute on sex offenders.

This formula appeared even earlier in criminal statutes throughout the southern United States, attested from the 1870s and 1880s from Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. The full phrase (with “for”) is first found from the late 1880s in US statutes.

All of which still does not mean that the word fuck derives from this or any other acronym: it does not.

A far more absurd entry in the category of folk etymology is the “pluck yew” story, which conflates the origin of fuck with earlier folklore about the origin of the offensive backhand two-finger ges­ture, the British form of what is usually an extended middle finger in America. In the original form of the tale, before the battle of Agincourt in 1415 (immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V), the French taunted the English longbowmen by waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers—used to pull back the bowstring—could never de­feat the mighty French.

After the English longbowmen convincingly showed their superiority (ten thousand French dead to a mere twenty-nine British, in Shakespeare’s exaggerated count), they waved their two fingers back at the French in the now familiar gesture. The fact that longbows were traditionally made of yew has produced a recent twist in the telling: to claim that drawing back the bowstring was called “plucking yew,” and thereby to assert that the victorious English not only waved their fin­gers at the French but shouted “We can still pluck yew! Pluck yew!” at them.

A convenient sound change and a respelling brings us to the familiar phrase “fuck you.” This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was popularized on the NPR show Car Talk, where it was meant as a joke; it spread on the Internet in the 1990s as a serious explanation.

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The Taboo Status of Fuck

Early Modern English

The demand for bawdy humor throughout history has meant that writers have always found ways to use certain words, even if they were prohibited by social conventions. In Shakespeare, for instance, one can find two clear references to cunt.

In Twelfth Night (II.v), Olivia’s butler Malvolio receives a letter written by Maria but in Olivia’s hand­writing; analyzing the script, Malvolio says, “My my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.” With the and sounding like “N,” Shakespeare not only spells out cunt, but gets a pun on pee in there as well.

And more famously, in Hamlet (III.ii) the prince uses the phrase “country matters” in a manner clearly alluding to cunt (Hamlet’s next crack is about what “lie[s] between maids’ legs”).

Though Shakespeare never actually uses fuck itself, his plays con­tain several examples of probable puns on or references to the word. A Latin grammar lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) gives us the focative case (punning on the vocative case, used for direct ad­dress), followed up immediately with a raft of lewd wordplay, including sexual puns on Latin words and references to various English words for the sexual organs.

In Henry V (IV.iv) the notoriously bawdy Pistol threatens to “firk” an enemy soldier; though firk does have a legiti­mate sense ‘to strike’, which is appropriate here, it was used elsewhere in the Elizabethan era as a euphemism for fuck, and it is likely that Shakespeare had this in mind as well. In several places he refers to the French word foutre, which is the literal (and also vulgar) equivalent of fuck; the most notable is this passage in Henry V (III.iv), in which Princess Katherine is having an English lesson:

Katherine: Comment appellez-vous les pieds et la robe? [What do you call le pied and la robe?]

Alice: De foot, madame; et de cown [a French pronunciation of gown; these English words sound like the French words foutre “fuck” and con “cunt”]

Katherine: De foot et de cown? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique! [Dear Lord! Those are bad-sounding words, wicked, vulgar, and indecent!]

Shakespeare elsewhere (2 Henry IV V.iii) has Pistol say, “A foutra for the world and worldlings base!,” and in at least one place (Merry Wives II.i) he uses foot as a probable pun on foutre. As the Henry V passage shows, Shakespeare was well aware that this word was vulgar—at least in French—and there is a good possibility that these examples are in­tended to represent the taboo English word fuck.

Though the evidence clearly shows that fuck was considered vulgar in Shakespeare’s time, it’s hard to tell just how bad it was. But we have a remarkably informative example of its status from a source unex­pected in the late seventeenth century: pornography. Though there is little truly explicit English erotica before the Victorian era, one excep­tion is the 1680 The School of Venus, a translation of an earlier French work.

This graphically illustrated book—surviving in only a single copy, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich—is presented in the style of a dialogue between a sexually experienced older woman and her young niece, this format (common especially in the eighteenth century) allowing highly explicit discussions to appear in the guise of instruction. The author appears to have been unusually interested in language: at one point the characters discuss the precise differences in meaning among occupy, fuck, swive, incunt, and other verbs, and elsewhere the older woman explains why men use offensive words like cunt during intercourse.

We are also treated to a clear statement of how offensive fuck was:

There are other words which sound better, and are often used before Company, instead of Swiving and Fucking, which is too gross and downright Bawdy, fit only to be used among dissolute Persons; to avoid scandal, men modestly say, I kissed her, made much of her, re­ceived a favor from her, or the like.

Late Modern English

Certainly fuck was considered literally unprintable throughout the nineteenth century, except in obscure, secret, legal, or privately printed publications. Important early authors known to have used the word include Lord Rochester in the seventeenth century and Robert Burns in the late eighteenth; Burns was probably the latest important author known to use the word before the twentieth century, and he uses it only in The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a bawdy manuscript intended purely for private circulation.

Even Captain Francis Grose—a friend of Burns—felt compelled to spell it f—k in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785 and later editions; the word was expunged from the 1811 edition by a different compiler).

In a striking example of some Victorians’ unfamiliarity with bawdy vocabulary, we see that the poet Robert Browning egregiously misunderstood one common word. He encountered the couplet “They talked of his having a cardinal’s hat, / They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat,” in a seventeenth- century poem. Erroneously believing from this passage that the last word referred to a part of a nun’s habit, Browning wrote of “Cowls and twats” in his 1848 poem Pippa Passes.

This does not imply that fuck was unused, of course. John Farmer and W.E. Henley’s monumental Slang and Its Analogues (privately printed; the volume with fuck appeared in 1893) included the use of fucking as both an adjective and an adverb, described respectively as “A qualification of extreme contumely” and “a more violent form of bloody.”

These are labeled “common,” despite the fact that this editor has been able to discover hardly any earlier examples. No doubt this and various other senses were common but unprinted for some time previously.

While there seem to be a large number of new senses that are first found around World War I, it is likely that these were in use earlier, and their appearance in the 1910s is more a result of weakening taboos than of an actual increase in the number of words coined in that era. For although fuck may have been strictly taboo in mainstream usage in the nineteenth century, it was extremely common in the flourishing world of Victorian pornography.

Many explicit F- words are found in such sources from the 1860s onwards, often in ways that are scarcely different from their use in the hardcore pornography of the present day. And recent research has shown that various forms or senses that were thought to have emerged later were indeed in use in the nine­teenth century.

In two remarkable incidents, fuck even found its way into the very proper London Times in this prudish era. Reporting a speech delivered by Attorney General Sir William Harcourt, the Times printed on January 13, 1882:

I saw in a Tory journal the other day a note of alarm, in which they said, “Why, if a tenant- farmer is elected for the North Riding of Yorkshire the farmers will be a political power who will have to be reckoned with.” The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking. I think that is very likely.

It took the stunned editors four days to run an apology for what must have been a bit of mischief by the typesetter:

No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to discover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpola­tion of a line in the speech of Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is hoped that the perpetrator of the outrage will be brought to punishment.

And later that year, on June 12, 1882, the following advertise­ment appeared in the Times: “Everyday Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fucking, which is in Common Use in those Schools.”

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Current Norms

The twenty-first-century Times still holds its nose and avoids pub­lishing swear words whenever it can, at least in theory. If they must be included, its 2022 style guide says, writers must “soften them with three asterisks: f***.” Though it acknowledges that the practice looks “horrid,” for the Times editors this is a reason to avoid not the asterisks but the entire swear word.

Other text-led “broadsheet” or “quality” press in the UK are more or less matter-of-fact about printing fuck and other taboo terms. Meanwhile, the so-called red tops—image-led tabloids with a sensa­tionalist tone, and a red masthead that gives them their informal col­lective name—are more inclined to apply asterisks even to relatively mild swear words. This approach can sometimes pose a puzzle for readers: is “b*******” meant to be bastards or bollocks?

Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several centuries ago religious blasphemy was the most unforgivable type of expression (we observe that in the 1528 example we’ve mentioned, it is the word damned, not fucking, that is elided).

Parentage based insults were also considered extreme, with bastard often written with dashes in place of some letter. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word leg was considered inde­cent; the proper substitute was limb.

Now slurs, such as racial or ethnic epithets, are the scourge; recent surveys in multiple countries, in­cluding the United States, UK, and New Zealand, show them rising to the top of the offensiveness charts. One prominent professor told US News & World Report in 1994 that if she used fuck in class, no one would bat an eye, but that she would never dare to use any racial epithet in any context.

This trend has only accelerated: simply mentioning the word that we euphemize as the N-word is usually forbidden even in ed­ucational contexts, while the unrelated word niggardly, tainted by sim­ilarity, has fallen into disuse, itself often specifically banned. Research has found that exposure to slurs, uniquely among taboo words, can cause measurable psychological and social harm.

Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever. Regular surveys of public attitudes published by British broad­casting regulator Ofcom provide a useful barometer of the word’s changing taboo status in the UK.

In its recent reports, older people are more likely to rate the F-word as a strong swear, while middle-aged people consider it moderate, and young people see it as becoming more acceptable in public use. Equivalent research in New Zealand shows “significant declines in unacceptability of fuck– words” even from 2018 to 2022.

While a few publications still refuse to print fuck regardless of the circumstances, most have no such qualms. The more literary magazines have printed the word for some time, and by the early 2000s even Newsweek and Time had started to do so; the publication of the Starr Report in the New York Times, and a notable comment from Vice President Dick Cheney in the Washington Post, has meant that even the proper papers consider fuck fit to print.

Even commercial televi­sion, though still subject to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, is becoming more open in its use.

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Excerpted with permission from The F-Word IV Edition, edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Copyright @2024 by Oxford University Press.

Jesse Sheidlower

Jesse Sheidlower is the editor of the previous editions of The F-Word. He was Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1999 to 2013; since then, he has remained active in linguistic matters. He has served as President of the American Dialect Society, and now teaches lexicography at Columbia University. He has written about language for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Lingua Franca, Playboy, Esquire, Slate, Boing Boing, MBookforum, and various scholarly journals, including American Speech, Dictionaries (journal of the Dictionary Society of North America), and The Journal of English Linguistics. He is also the editor of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, an online resource which launched in 2021.