The F-Word (6 page)

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

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
, F
ANNY 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
.

A small number of entries have been deleted entirely. While there are still examples of words or senses with only one quotation (suggesting that they are not and never have been very common), the decision to remove existing entries of this sort was not undertaken lightly. The deleted examples include
give-a-fuck
‘one’s sense of motivation or enthusiasm’, an apparently unique variant of the itself rare
give-a-shit
;
fucking
used interjectionally to indicate hesitation, which was perhaps an example of overextrapolation by a
dictionary compiler; and
fuck-ox
, a military term for a Vietnamese water buffalo, a further example of which could not be found even in extensive searches of Vietnam War literature. It is possible that additional items could have been removed as well, but a conservative approach seemed best.

This book would not have been possible without the help of a large number of people across a long span of time. Of course all errors are my own fault.

For the earlier editions, Bernard W. Kane was indefatigable in providing buckets of useful suggestions; John Simpson generously sent me several citations from the files of the
Oxford English Dictionary
; Fred Shapiro’s wizardry with database searches yielded a large number of updatings and important additions to the text; James Rader of Merriam-Webster sent early examples of several terms I had difficulty tracking down. My former colleagues at Random House provided assistance and support of various flavors.

Professor Anatoly Liberman was kind enough to share his detailed researches into the etymology and bibliography of
fuck
. His entry on the word in the
Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology
is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the etymology of
fuck
ever published.

H. Bosley Woolf generously sent me a copy of his privately printed pamphlet
The GI’s Favorite Four Letter Word
, the earliest published work devoted solely to our word.