The expression four-letter word is first found in 1897 and was well enough established by the 1930s to be used in Cole Porter’s classic lyric “Anything Goes” in 1934: “Good authors, too, who once used better words/Now only use four-letter words/Writing prose/Anything goes.” (The related expression four-letter man, indicating a “man who can be described by a four-letter word [usually shit, but sometimes goof, bore, or dumb]” was common in the 1920s.) With both eff and four-letter word in use in the 1930s, it would not be too surprising if the F-word were used at that time as well. However, the earliest example of which the editor is aware is not until the early 1950s, and that was in an academic journal, discussing the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (see the entry for F-WORD in this dictionary). The later evidence, however, suggests that it was still mainly used as a childish euphemism—another reason to believe that it may have been used earlier, since words such as these are seldom written down.
The use of the F-word increased throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and eventually the suffix –word began to be used freely with the first letter of a word—any word—to be avoided. There are occasional examples from the early 1980s of, for instance, the L-word for “ lesbian,” but this practice did not really peak until the mid- to late-1980s. By this time it was often jocular, as in the L-word for “love” or “ liberal,” or the T-word for “taxes,” but serious examples were also used: the N-word for “nigger.” This combining form of the suffix -word, finally liberated from association with fuck, appeared by itself in general dictionaries by the early 1990s.
The trick of spelling out the word fuck is not new. When the singer Britney Spears released a single called “If You Seek Amy,” with the song title spelling out “F-U-C-K me,” in 2009, it was viewed as shocking, with parents registering complaints and so forth, despite the fact that phrases of this sort have been around for centuries, including, as we have seen, in Shakespeare. In Ulysses, James Joyce made the same pun with the bit of doggerel, “If you see Kay. / Tell him he may. / See you in tea. / Tell him from me,” thus managing to spell out cunt as well. Take that, Britney!
Indeed, the trope is well established among musicians. The blues pianist Memphis Slim recorded a wistful song about his lost girlfriend, called “If You See Kay,” in 1963. In 1977, lo-fi pioneer R. Stevie Moore released his “If You See Kay,” a lopingly heartbroken revenge song that concludes: “If you see Kay you.” The title was used, less wistfully and less heartbrokenly, by the Canadian rock band April Wine, on their 1982 album Power Play (sample lyrics: “She had the look of need / Like ‘Give it to me’/I decided I should take a chance”). The pop-punk band Poster Children released a ragged, raucous version on their 1990 Daisychain Reaction. The Norwegian punk band Turbonegro released the slick and poppy “If You See Kaye,” performed in English, in 2005. Aerosmith used the line in a lyric in their 2006 song “Devil’s Got a New Disguise.” (In 1991, Van Halen released the album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, though this was surely not intended to be even remotely subtle.) One of the catchiest recent iterations of this trope comes from the Irish band The Script, which released its “If You See Kay” on MySpace. In a 2009 interview, the band explicitly acknowledged its debt to James Joyce—whom they helpfully identify as “a literary god in Ireland”—noting the use of the gag in Ulysses.
In all of these cases, the performers are letting the double-entendre work for them; this is not the case with Britney, whose use of the phrase is not a pun. There is only one possible way to interpret it, since the lyric itself makes no sense in context: “All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek Amy.” The use of Amy in this context does seem to be new, though.
Aside from the the use of initial letters, the use of euphemisms for fuck itself is also long established. This dictionary includes a number of euphemisms for fuck that are used as phonetic substitutions for the word, with frig being both early, and also used in a very wide variety of constructions.
As we have seen, when Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead in 1948, he was persuaded by his publisher to use the spelling fug, leading to the story that Tallulah Bankhead (or, in some versions of the anecdote, Dorothy Parker) approached Mailer at a party and said “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” (Of course this spelling was never intended to be any kind of a true mask.)
Another form of avoidance was the use of typographical markers to show that certain letters in a word are to be omitted. The earliest known example of this practice is from 1680, in a poem by John Oldham entitled “Upon the Author of a Play call’d Sodom,” where the word turd has the vowel replaced by a dash. Richard Ames’s 1688 “Satyr Again Man” includes a number of typographically bleeped words, including bl–d for ‘blood’, w–nds for ‘wounds’ (both only when used as oaths; in their normal senses they are written out in the usual way), and G-d and d-mn. By 1698 we have our first example of the bleeped fuck; see the quote at FUCK v. sense 1.c. in this dictionary.
Such dashes were common throughout the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth century (if not earlier), asterisks were pressed into service. The 1857 example in this dictionary at FUCKING adj. sense 2 is striking in its combination of dashes (to partly obscure the less offensive word bitch) and asterisks (to entirely obscure a word that we must conclude is fucking).
This Dictionary and Its Policies
Selection of Entries, and Inclusion Policy
This book contains every sense of fuck, and every compound word or phrase of which fuck is a part, that the editor believes has ever had broad currency in English. It does not contain words meaning ‘to have sex’ or ‘to victimize’ that are used, often unconsciously, as euphemisms for fuck, such as lay, screw, shaft, or do it. However, it does include euphemisms for fuck that directly suggest, in sound and meaning, the word itself: thus the inclusion of freaking, foul up, mofo, and others. These words are typically used as direct replacements for fuck.
In earlier editions of this book, priority was given to American English; indeed, in its first edition, forms not found in America were excluded entirely. However, the text is now much more wide-ranging, thanks to the editor’s access to the files of the OED: uses that are specifically British, Australian, or Irish are included in their own right, and a very large number of quotations have been added from non-American sources to illustrate all entries, not just those associated with a particular national variety. The reader will thus find vastly more British examples (including Welsh and especially Scottish in addition to English), and also quotations from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and elsewhere.
Preference has been given to words found in actual use, though the editor did find it necessary to consult other dictionaries or word lists. For earlier uses, where evidence from written sources is sparse, a dictionary quotation may represent a genuine use that is simply unattested elsewhere. But in many cases, words that are found only in dictionaries are joke words, made up as a lark, and there is no way of gauging their true currency; compilers of slang dictionaries put them in because they find such words amusing, or because they can’t verify whether the words are truly in use and want to be safe by being completist. For example, the World War II snafu gave rise to a number of other words with the fu element, including janfu, snefu, and tarfu, and fubar and its relations. Certain specialized dictionaries or glossaries of World War II language contain many more examples, but we have no written or spoken evidence of actual use. This suggests that these words were never used seriously, but treated only as jokes. Thus this dictionary does not include tasfuira ‘things are so fucked up it’s really amazing’, among others.
The availability of massive full-text databases, as well as Google and other search engines, has, perhaps contrary to expectations, greatly complicated the decision-making process. Even a quick look at, say, www.urbandictionary.com will show that there are very many words or phrases with fuck that are not included in this dictionary. Opening the book up to every word or compou
nd for which examples can be found on the Internet would make it very much longer than it is now, with uncertain benefits. The editor has thus done his best to try to determine which of these is most likely to be in truly broad circulation. In general, examples from printed sources have been given preference over online examples. Uses from popular movies or television shows have also received preferred treatment, though even some prominent examples from these genres did not make the cut. Though the song “Uncle Fucka,” from the 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, is a brilliant work and won an MTV Movie Award for Best Musical Performance, uncle fucker was not included; there was simply no evidence for a broad use of the term.
A partial list of terms that have been excluded includes clothes-fuck ‘a difficulty in deciding what to wear’; figure-fucking ‘altering financial documents; “cooking the books” ’; fuck eyes ‘sexually flirtatious glances’; fuck lips ‘the labia’; fuckomania ‘rampant sexual desire’; fuck-stain ‘a foolish or offensive person’; fuck udders ‘a woman’s breasts’; and fuckwaddery ‘the nature of being a fuckwad; stupidity’.
The editor encourages readers to write in with suggestions for words that are omitted, especially if there is solid evidence for their genuine use, for possible inclusion in future editions.
The Entries
The entries in this book are arranged alphabetically, letter by letter. A word may be shown as a main entry more than once, depending on its use as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, or infix (a word, such as -fucking-, inserted within another word or set phrase, forming such other words as absofuckinglutely).
Within an entry, numbered senses are ordered by the date of the first citation, as are the lettered subsenses within a numbered sense. This allows the historical development of the senses to be clearly seen.
Phrases using fuck or a derivative are listed alphabetically at the end of the main entry; some phrases may be listed as part of a definition in the main body of the entry. Phrases are preceded by the pointing-middle-finger symbol () for clarity.
Cross-references to other words in this volume are given in SMALL CAPITALS. Cross references to phrases are given in italic type and specify the main entry word where the phrase may be found.
Certain citations have been placed in square brackets to indicate that the example does not show, or does not clearly show, the use of the word it is meant to illustrate, but provides a parallel or prefiguring use. Examples are the first quotation for CFM, which contains the full form come fuck me but not the abbreviation itself; the first two quotations for fuck the dog under DOG noun, which use “feed” and “walk” instead of fuck, with no way to tell whether these were euphemisms or unrelated uses; and finger-frig, almost a hundred years earlier than the first actual quotation for FINGER-FUCK.
Field labels, such as Military or Black English or British, describe the group or subculture of people who use the word (not necessarily those to whom the word applies). The choice of labels was made on the basis of the evidence, and it is not intended to be limiting. The presence of a label should not imply that the word is used exclusively by the designated group, or that persons using such words have real ties to the group.
The Examples
Each entry in this book is illustrated with a number of examples of the use of the word in context—quotations from books and magazines, movies or television, the Internet, and sometimes even from speech. These examples, called citations (or cites for short) by dictionary editors, have several purposes: to demonstrate that a word or sense has actually been in use; to show the length of time it has existed; to show exactly how it has been used; and so forth.
In every case, the first citation given is the earliest one that the editor has been able to find. The last citation is, within reason, the most recent example available. Only a few F-words are truly obsolete and therefore have no recent example. The dates provide important evidence for the use of a word. We may discover that although fuck around ‘to play or fool around’ is recorded only from the early twentieth century, the similar use of frig is found in the late eighteenth. Therefore, that sense of fuck itself may be just as old but simply unrecorded owing to the vulgarity of the term.
Every example is preceded by its bibliographic source. Most of the sources may be found in a good research library, though some are from manuscripts or other sources kept in the files of the Random House Reference Division or the Oxford English Dictionary. The examples taken from speech were collected by the editor, or in some cases by researchers for Random House; the date refers to the year in which the example was actually collected. Online examples can be found in expected places: Usenet quotations are archived at Google Groups; ones from electronic editions of newspapers will be at the Web site of those papers; etc.
The date shown for each citation is the date when we believe the word was actually written or used. This is usually the same as the publication date. Occasionally, when a passage (or the entire book) is known to have been written at an earlier date, that date will be given instead. In most such cases the year of publication is given in parentheses after the title. This is also the case when the quotation was taken from a later edition of a book, but with the expectation that the quotation was present in an earlier edition: The date of the original edition will be given, with the later edition in parentheses after the title. When a book or magazine is quoting an earlier source, the word “in” appears after the date: 1528 in Notes & Queries.
Jesse Sheidlower, New York
Introduction to the Third Edition
The F-Word was first published in 1995. There were various extensive changes introduced in the Second Edition of this book, which was published in 1999. Most prominently, the original edition included only F-words that were in use in America; the Second Edition added entries for British and Australian and other uses. It also added a variety of new quotations, including some famous ones that were of interest, and added some words and senses that had been missed.
This Third Edition introduces a vastly larger number of changes. The dictionary text is about twice as large as the Second Edition, and well over 100 new words and senses have been added. A significant number of existing entries have been antedated—that is, earlier examples have been found, showing that a word has been in use for longer than we once thought. All this has been made possible in large part because of the increased availability of online resources. The second major factor is the editor’s move to the Oxford English Dictionary, and thus his access to its files.
There have been a number of other changes. A broad effort has been made to fix the bibliographic information. Titles have been regularized, and where possible given in their full form. Initials have been added to the names of most authors. Dates assigned to books have been regularized; parenthesized dates have been added to editions of letters or journals, later editions of works, and other cases where the date given for the quotation does not correspond to the publication date of the book in which it was found.
The quotations have been a particular focus of the work. Thousands have been added to this edition. The editor has tried to broaden the range of evidence as much as possible. The geographic range has been expanded, so that, for example, British authors are quoted even for terms that are originally American, and quotations have been added from South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere (a typical practice is to quote from “minority” regions only for terms associated with those regions). A number of uninteresting quotations have been deleted if they could be replaced with better ones from a similar date, and many quotations were added because the editor found them interesting or amusing.
The use of full-text databases has also allowed many existing entries to be expanded or split up. Many entries had parts of speech combined, so that the definition of a word found chiefly as a verb, but with a single noun example, would lump the two uses together. Now, with more noun uses, this use could be split off into its own entry. Examples of this process include CUNT-FUCK noun,
which previously had only a single quotation from 1998, from a Usenet newsgroup devoted to erotic stories, but has now been expanded into a full-fledged entry, with four quotations covering the range of 1879 to 2002; FUCKWITTED adjective, previously part of FUCKWIT noun but now on its own; FUGLY noun, separated from the adjective; and SPORT FUCK noun, upgraded from the verb. Similarly, some entries that were subsumed under others have been elevated. Thus the phrases fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke and fuck you and the horse you rode in on were both in the earlier editions, but merely thrown in with other, less frequent phrases. But it was clear that these should be given individual treatment.
In many other cases, existing entries have been expanded with new senses or parts of speech. The original entry for ASS-FUCK had a single example of ‘an instance of victimization’ for the noun; there are now a number of quotations for this sense, as well as a new noun sense ‘a despicable person’ and a new verb sense ‘to victimize’. The noun BUTTFUCKER, previously included under BUTT-FUCK verb, is now an entry in its own right, with both the literal sense and the figurative ‘despicable person’. The adjective FUCK-FACED, previously only recorded in the sense ‘having an ugly face’, now has two additional senses, ‘tired’ and ‘drunk; shit-faced’. BFD, in previous editions only present as an interjection, now has a noun equivalent, and the adjective and adverb FUBAR now has a verb.
The bulk of the additions consist of entirely new words. Some are non-American forms that the editor had missed, including the British eff and blind under EFF verb, FANNY ADAMS, fuck knows under FUCK verb, and HEADFUCK in senses related to confusion; the Canadian FUDDLE-DUDDLE; the Australian FARK; the Irish FECK. Some are initialisms, many now chiefly associated with the world of online communication, such as FOAD, OMFG, STFU, and especially the now mainstream MILF. But most are simply new or newish developments, or older terms that were rare enough to have been omitted before but for which substantial evidence is now available. A smattering of the many such new entries includes ARTFUCK, F-BOMB, FLAT FUCK, FRAK, I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick under FUCK verb, FUCKABILITY, FUCKFRIEND, FUCKLESS, FUCK MACHINE, FUCKSHIT, HATE-FUCK verb, PIGFUCK, THROAT FUCK, and UNFUCKED.
The F-Word Page 4
