201 ways to say 'f**k':

What 1.7 billion words of online text shows about how the world swears

- MARTIN SCHWEINBERGER and KATE BURRIDGE

Our brains swear for good reasons: to vent, cope, boost our grit, and feel closer to those around us. Swear words can act as social glue and play meaningful roles in how people communicate, connect and express themselves — both in person, and online.

In our new research published in Lingua, we analyzed more than 1.7 billion words of online language across 20 English-speaking regions. We identified 597 different swear word forms — from standard words to creative spellings like “4rseholes,” to acronyms like “wtf.”

The findings challenge a familiar stereotype. Australians — often thought of as prolific swearers — are actually outdone by Americans and Brits, both in how often they swear, and in how many users swear online.

FACTS AND FIGURES

Our study focused on publicly available web data (such as news articles, organizational websites, government or institutional publications, and blogs — but excluding social media and private messaging). We found vulgar words made up 0.036% of all words in the dataset from the United States, followed by 0.025% in the British data, and 0.022% in the Australian data.

Although vulgar language is relatively rare in terms of overall word frequency, it was used by a significant number of individuals.