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.
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).
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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. Though Shakespeare never actually uses fuck itself, his plays contain several examples of probable puns on or references to the word. In Henry V (III.iv), Princess Katherine is having an English lesson where the English words foot and gown sound like the French words foutre (“fuck”) and con (“cunt”).
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. The 1680 The School of Venus, a translation of an earlier French work, provides 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.”
Late Modern English
Certainly fuck was considered literally unprintable throughout the nineteenth century, except in obscure, secret, legal, or privately printed publications. Even Captain Francis Grose—a friend of Robert Burns—felt compelled to spell it f—k in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785).
This does not imply that fuck was unused, of course. John Farmer and W.E. Henley’s monumental Slang and Its Analogues (1893) included the use of fucking as both an adjective and an adverb. 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.
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, a line where the speaker said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking. It took the stunned editors four days to run an apology for what must have been a bit of mischief by the typesetter.
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***.”
Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several centuries ago religious blasphemy was the most unforgivable type of expression. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking. Now slurs, such as racial or ethnic epithets, are the scourge; recent surveys in multiple countries show them rising to the top of the offensiveness charts.
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.
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.
Excerpted with permission from The F-Word IV Edition, edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Copyright @2024 by Oxford University Press.
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