Guess what? The taboo around the word fuck is still so dense that etymology dictionaries don’t even list it. Which makes me really upset since this mysterious word must have had a very interesting life. Poor thing, to be left out like that. And it’s probably one of the most common words in this language! It wasn’t until 1965 that it was listed in a dictionary, and even then the publisher felt it necessary to do a fuck-free version, known as the Clean Green or “Texas” edition, tailored for the Southwest high school market. Because the word has always been taboo, especially in written language, it’s hard to trace its origins. Fortunately, once again, the Internet comes to my rescue with some etymology of this favored curse.

Fornication under the Consent of the King?

Have you ever heard the urban legend that fuck is an acronym for ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’ or ‘Fornication Under the Consent of the King’? There are many variants of this story, one of which is that people in Christianized Britain needed the permission of the king to, umm, fuck and have kids, and this consent was made public with a placard with the acronym inscribed. Like all juicy urban legends this folk etymology is completely bogus. It turns out that fuck is actually a quite ordinary Germanic word that goes way, way, way back.

According to etymonline.com, it is first attested to in early 16th century sources as fukkit. However, the scarce evidence in the literature suggests that it is much older than that. In 1278 a guy named John had the last name “le Fucker”; and a 15th century poem in bastard Latin and Middle English has the lines: “Non sunt in celi, quia fuccant uuiuys of heli,” which means: “They (the monks) are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.” Fuck was not borrowed from Latin, but the fact that there was a fake Latin version of it suggests that it was used in English at the time.

There’s not really a consensus on the origins of fuck. One theory is that it was borrowed into Scottish Gaelic from Scandinavian when the Vikings invaded Britain ca. 800. From there it was supposedly borrowed into English. Some Scandinavian cognates support this view: a Norwegian dialect has fukka, ‘to copulate’; a Swedish dialect has focka, ‘to strike, push, copulate’ as well as fock, ‘penis.’

Another explanation is that fuck is related to Middle English fike, ‘move restlessly, fidget’ or ‘flirt,’ from Dutch or Low German origin. This is supported by Middle Dutch fokken, ‘to thrust, copulate with’ and German ficken ‘fuck’ which earlier meant ‘to make quick movements to and fro. In any case, the word is most definitely Germanic. One source states that it is “almost certainly” from the Indo-European root peuk, ‘to prick’, which is also the source of English words such as poignant, point, puncture, and pygmy. (The p in Proto-Indo-European—seen in Latin—changing into f in Proto-Germanic—seen in English words that were not borrowed from Latin—a part of a cool pattern called Grimm’s Law in linguistics).
 

An innocent habit or worthy of the death penalty?

Although fuck doesn’t appear often in the literature of the Middle Ages and was banned by law it in print both in Britain (1857) and the US (1873), the popular curse has been around in informal speech for centuries. This fuck-craze is not at all our generation’s fault. For example, it played a big role in the vocabulary of World War I soldiers: “It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, ‘Get your ----ing rifles!’ it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said ‘Get your rifles!’ there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger” (etymonline.com, quoting John Brophy in Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918).

Many of us use fuck in our daily life vocabulary spontaneously and without meaning any offense by it. However, it doesn’t look like fuck will lose its taboo mojo any time soon. The beauty of fuck is precisely this dual identity: both an innocent habit and a powerful curse that, inevitably, can cause a lot of confusion. If you ask people why they swear, you’ll get very different answers and examples—simply because we don’t know which words are true, offensive swearwords and still have the “I-really-mean-it-this-time, back-off!” code.

Finally, we have to give fuck some credit for being such an awesome source of creative phrases and words in the English vocabulary. If you look it up in a dictionary of slang, you’ll find many, many pages of things like fucking A, motherfucker etc. (not to mention flying fuck which is attested from ca. 1800 and originally meant “to have sex on horseback” – man, people must have had curious sex lives back then…).

I say we take our hats off to fuck for its incredible longevity despite centuries of persecution, and for inspiring so much debate and creativity through the ages!