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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Introduction to the Fourth Edition Acknowledgements The F-Word

About the Author :
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.

Review :
The F Word is an astounding work of scholarship...an exhaustive but exhilarating ode to the creativity of obscenity. Lexicography and lexicographers, like great wines, improve with age. Never more so than in this, the fourth revision of Jesse Sheidlower's The F-Word, his incomparably authoritative study of language's most notorious four letters. From the deep scholarship of its introduction to the fascinating range of illustrative citations, this is a masterpiece of its type. Or to suit praise to prose: it's fucking-A! On the subject of that prize word of words, here's everything you ever wanted to know, everything you didn't know you wanted to know, everything you perhaps didn't want to know at all (but now you're glad you know it). I giggled, I chortled, I blanched, I blenched, I even gasped a few times. Jesse Sheidlower's exhaustive new edition of The F-Word may strike you as an unlikely candidate for bedside-table permanency, but I'm certain I'll want to keep my copy ever handy. Everybody knows the f-word can serve any part of speech and that we use it with seemingly endless meanings, and all sorts of words -- f-words and euphemisms (let's call them eff-words) - derive from the OF. But everybody doesn't know the half of it until they peruse the new edition of Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word. Even if they encountered the third edition, they may not know about the 150 or so new f- and eff-words Sheidlower has uncovered since. The remarkable range of historical quotations in The F-Word shows us just how expressive and essential f-words can be, how they suffuse our experience. Over four editions of The F-Word, Sheidlower has proved that the f-word's story is a never-ending story. I'm already looking forward to the fifth edition. The F-Word is a delight. It's informative, hugely entertaining yet also a work of serious scholarship which treats its subject matter with just the right degree of academic respect while retaining a sense of enjoyably transgressive naughtiness.