The F-Word

A skillfully updated edition of The F-Word which renders a comprehensive portrait of English's most notorious and colorful word.

No word has generated more uses, more creative euphemisms, and more strong opinions than fuck. Jesse Sheidlower's historical dictionary, now in print for over 25 years, charts the uses of fuck and its many permutations, from absofuckinglutely to zipless fuck. It illustrates every sense of every entry with quotations, from the earliest that can be found to a recent example, showing exactly how the word has been used throughout history.

This new edition is not just a minor update but a comprehensive revision of Sheidlower's groundbreaking text for the internet age. Major new discoveries push back the known history of fuck by almost two hundred years. Sheidlower also considers rapidly changing attitudes towards the use of fuck in public discourse. The volume includes over 2,500 new quotations; over 150 new antedatings (earlier examples of existing entries, improving our understanding of the word's development); and over 150 entries, including high-profile recent uses such as AF 'as fuck', fuckboi, and the group of expressions of the sort to give no fucks or zero fucks given.

Jesse Sheidlower is the editor of the previous editions of The F-Word. He was Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1999 to 2013; since then, he has remained active in linguistic matters. He has served as President of the American Dialect Society, and now teaches lexicography at Columbia University. He has written about language for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Lingua Franca, Playboy, Esquire, Slate, Boing Boing, Bookforum, and various scholarly journals, including American Speech, Dictionaries (journal of the Dictionary Society of North America), and The Journal of English Linguistics. He is also the editor of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, an online resource which launched in 2021.