Recommendations from our site
“This is a great one for showcasing the variety of swearing and all the circumstances you can use this one word. It starts with “absofuckinglutely” and ends with “zipless fuck,” and in the middle has “dumbfuck,” “frig,” “unfuckable”—so many great words. He’s done this excellent research, so you can see the dates when they were all first used, with quotes.” Read more...
Melissa Mohr, Linguist
“Everybody should look at this and see how lexicography should be done, because it is a superb piece of work. It’s not a grubby book, or a meretricious book, it’s an amazing piece of scholarship. There is a substantial introduction which covers the etymology of ‘fuck,’ the censorship it has received, and the way in which the word has emerged into wider usage from having been absolutely taboo. Then there are a couple of hundred pages dealing with every instance of the word, be it a derivation like ‘fuckster,’ a compound like ‘fuckwit’ or a phrase such as ‘get fucked.’ There are hundreds of them and, just like the Oxford English Dictionary, it has a body of supporting citations. So you’ve got depth of scholarship, depth of knowledge, depth of information and a formidably large number of f-words.” Read more...
Jonathon Green, Literary Scholar
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The F-Word
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History in English Words
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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
by Simon Winchester
