NSFW: most used curse words in history?

Ok, this is pure fun. I took George Carlin’s 7 Dirty words (The only words you can’t say on U.S. television, or couldn’t), and put them into Google Labs Ngram viewer (which searches for usage of words in the entire google books archive). I made a guess before I ran the query – I expected all the words to rise in usage over the last 40 years. I was wrong:

Chart shown below / link to query:

As some of you know, big ranges in data hide trends. So I took out the big outliers (Shit and Fuck) and ran the same query, yielding the chart below (query here) – overall positive trend on all of them, but more interesting than the first chart:

18 Responses to “NSFW: most used curse words in history?”

  1. Jim Johnson

    The bump around 1900 is interesting. I wonder what caused it?

    Reply
    1. Scott Berkun

      I don’t know that much about the weak spots in their data – blips like that could be bias in publishing (maybe they had access to one raunchy publisher who went out of business in a year or two) or there’s an actual trend of note. Hard to know.

      Reply
  2. Ken K

    It looks like at least 6 of the 7 DID rise in usage. The big two have crossed into almost mainstream use as general purpose expletives, dwarfing the others. The others have retained narrower definitions.

    Reply
    1. Scott Berkun

      Ken: Good point – scale factors are at work in this chart. I’ll see if I can make google give me a narrower range of data.

      Reply
  3. Ken K

    Interesting data problem prior to 1820-ish: “The long s is subject to confusion with the lower case or minuscule f, sometimes even having an f-like nub at its middle for the “F” word.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) You can look at the really old books and see that Google scans the long s as an f, so “suck” becomes the “f” word. Cool!

    Reply
  4. Ko Nakatsu

    When I was on the radio, we were also not allowed to use the word “asshole”. If you include that word in the original query, it’s a nice trending addition to “shit” and “fuck”.

    Reply
  5. Rich

    Glad to see that tits are back in the rise.

    Reply
  6. Jeb

    I thought for sure that cunt would be more popular, but I do understand the problem. People need to use a wider variety of cuss words.

    Motherfucker did enjoy a surge of popularity related to the release of pulp fiction.

    Reply
  7. Smartini

    @Jeb, not forgetting Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Looking at the trend, this particular cuss word may well have gone the way of Smallpox if it wasn’t for Axel Foley’s volcabulary.

    Reply
  8. Warren

    Cool tool. Check out the word “peace”. Except for a couple of blips, in steady decline. :(

    Reply
  9. Jeff

    Major error : The ngram viewer is case sensitive. Search for the lowercased versions of all of those and the graphs change quite a bit, especially making your final interesting graph not at all interesting and almost identical to “Fuck” and “Shit”

    Reply
  10. Dennis

    Tits or GTFO, motherfuckers!

    Reply

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