3 July 2023 (Updated 8 July 2023 to add the appearance in Florio’s dictionary.)
Tracing the origin of fuck has been a difficult one for etymologists and lexicographers. Because it has been a taboo word for many centuries, there is little record to go on. But modern etymologists have pieced together the history, albeit with some gaps still existing here and there.
We know that fuck is of Germanic origin, with a root that means to strike or to move back and forth. Note that is Germanic and not German—an important distinction. It does not come from the modern German verb ficken. Instead, these two words probably share a common root. Fuck also has cognates in other Northern European languages: the Middle Dutch fokken meaning to thrust, to copulate; the dialectical Norwegian fukka meaning to copulate; and the dialectical Swedish focka meaning to strike, push, copulate, and fock meaning penis. And both French and Italian have similar words, foutre and fottere respectively. These derive from the Latin futuere. The relation between this Latin root and the Germanic ones, if any, is uncertain.
As to exactly how English got its word, we don’t know. There are no likely candidates in the Old English corpus, so fuck presumably was borrowed into English from a Germanic language either late in the Old English period or shortly after the Norman Conquest. Possibly, it may have come from Old Norse, introduced into northern England during Danish rule of the region in the ninth through eleventh centuries. Another possible route could have been through trade and contact with what is now the Netherlands. Other routes of entry are possible too.
We have instances in the record from the fourteenth century that we can say with high confidence are variations on fuck, and it absolutely is in place by the end of the fifteenth century. Most of the early known usages of the English word come from Scotland and the north of England, leading some scholars to believe that the word comes from Scandinavian sources. Others disagree, believing that the number of northern citations reflects that the taboo was weaker in Scotland and the north, resulting in more surviving citations of use. The fact that there are citations, albeit fewer of them, from southern England dating from the same period seems to bear out this latter theory.
Collocations of the four letters can be found in medieval surnames dating to the thirteenth century, and less experienced word sleuths, and occasionally expert ones, often point to these as examples of fuck, but in most cases these collocations of letters represent a different word. For example, Carl Buck’s 1949 Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages contains a reference to a personal name, John le Fucker, from the year 1278. But this citation is questionable. No one has properly identified the document this name supposedly appears in, and if it is real, the name is likely a variant of fuker, a maker of cloth; fulcher, a soldier; or another similar word. Other examples use the root in its sense of to beat or to strike, rather than the sexual sense. Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word (the authoritative source for all things fuck and a must-read for anyone seriously interested in the word) points to the name Ric Wyndfuck appearing in a 1287 manuscript, but this is most likely an early variation on windfucker, a name for the kestrel. That name almost certainly comes from the repetitious beating of the bird’s wings and not any sexual sense. Also from 1287 is the surname Fuckebeggar, but again this is probably not a sexual reference but rather a calque of the Anglo-Norman surname Butevillein, literally meaning strike the churl. There are other examples of similar surnames, and pretty much, with one or two exceptions, not conveying any sexual sense.
One exception is the name, discovered by Paul Booth of Keele University, Roger Fuckebythenavele. That name appears seven times in the Chester County court plea rolls between 3 November 1310 and 28 September 1311 as part of a process to have the man declared an outlaw. The name, which literally means “fucked through/upon/next to the naval,” could have multiple meanings: it could signal Roger’s sexual inexperience and incompetence, attempting to penetrate the wrong place; it could refer to a practice of contraception by “pulling out”; or it could refer to a penchant for frottage. Many of us have embarrassing nicknames from our youths, but to have one this unfortunate remembered seven hundred years later is a special form of hell.
As with those other fuck-names, it’s possible that Fuckebythenavele referred to an incident or incidents where Roger struck someone or was struck himself in the belly, but the idea that the name is some kind of reference to sexual intercourse is the more parsimonious hypothesis. Another exception, although this one is less certain, is the placename Fockynggroue (Fucking-grove) found in a Bristol charter from 1373. This may come from a personal name like Focke or Fulk (Focke’s/Fulk’s grove), but it seems more likely that it comes from its use as a place for people to meet and surreptitiously get it on, a medieval lover’s lane of sorts.
The next known use of fuck is from c.1475 and is from a macaronic poem written in a mix of Latin and English and entitled Flen flyys. The relevant lines read:
Fratres Carmeli navigant in a bothe apud Eli,
Non sunt in caeli, quia gxddbiv xxjxzt pg ifmk.
(The Carmelite brothers sail in a boat near Ely; they are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.)
The words gxddbiv xxjxzt pg ifmk are enciphered, where each letter stands for the one preceding it in the alphabet, indicating that the word was taboo. The decoded words are fuccant uuivs of Heli. Fuccant is a pseudo-Latin word, an English root with a Latin inflectional ending. Ely is a town near Cambridge.
Interestingly, variants of the poem, without the offending word, were still circulating as school-boy rhymes as late as the nineteenth century:
Tres fratres caeli navigabant roundabout Eli;
Omnes drownderunt qui swimaway non potuerunt.
(Three brothers of heaven sailed roundabout Eli; all drowned who could not swim away.)
Fuck was not common prior to the 1960s, at least not in published use; informal, spoken use was much more frequent. Shakespeare does not use the word, although he did hint at its existence for comic effect. In Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) he gives us the pun “focative case.” In Henry V (IV.iv), the character Pistol threatens to “firk” a French soldier, a word meaning to strike, but commonly used as an Elizabethan euphemism for fuck. And earlier in the same play (III.iv), Princess Katherine confuses the English words foot and gown for the French foutre and coun (fuck and cunt, respectively) with comic results—the existence of the English equivalent words meant that those in the audience who didn’t speak French would get the joke.
Other poets and writers used the word, although it was far from common. Robert Burns, for example, used it in an c.1800 poem (the stanzas in question were not published until 1911):
John Anderson my jo, John,
You can f—k where’er you please,
Either in our warm bed,
or else aboon the claise;
Or you shall have the horns, John,
Upon your head to grow;
That is a cuckold’s malison,
John Anderson my jo.
So when you want to f—k, John,
See that you do your best,
When you begin to sh—g me,
See that you grip me fast;
See that you grip me fast, John,
Until that I cry Oh!
Your back shall crack, e’er I cry slack,
John Anderson my jo.
Prior to the 1960s, the taboo was so strong that most general dictionaries did not include an entry for fuck. John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, however, did include fuck in some of its definitions, although not as a headword. (Florio’s dictionary did not contain English-Italian entries.) One section reads:
Fottarie, iapings, sardings, swiuings, fuckings.
Fottente, occupying. Also an occupier.
Fóttere, fotto, fottei, fottuto, to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swiue, to occupy.
Fotterigia, a crampe fish.
Fottisterij, baudie or vauting houses. Also occupyers or baudie fellowes.
Fottitrice, a woman fucker, swiuer, sarder, or iaper.
Fottitore, a iaper, a sarder, a swiuer, a fucker, an occupier.
Fottitura, a iaping, a swiuing, a fucking, a sarding, an occupying.
Fottiuenti, windefuckers, stamels.
Fottura, as Fottitura.
Fottuto, iaped, occupied, sarded, swiued, [f]uckt.
That last word actually reads suckt, but that is almost certainly a misprint given the preceding definitions. (The letters <s> and <f> are almost identical in the typeface used.)
Another exception was Nathan Bailey’s 1721 dictionary, but even there the definition was given in Latin, presumably to keep schoolboys and other churlish figures from tittering at its inclusion: “Foeminam Subagitare” (to subdue a woman). As late as 1948, the publishers of The Naked and the Dead persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism fug instead, resulting in the delightful, but apocryphal, tale that Dorothy Parker (or maybe it was Talullah Bankhead, the various tellings differ) commented upon meeting Mailer: “So you’re the man who can’t spell fuck.” By the late 1960s, the taboo started to break down and fuck began to appear more frequently in print.
Finally, we can certainly dispense with a few of the more egregious legendary etymologies of the word. It is not an acronym for either Fornication Under Consent of the King or For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge or for anything else. Acronyms such as these are unknown before the late nineteenth century and not at all common until the twentieth. And the elaborate explanation concerning the archers in the Battle of Agincourt and the phrase Pluck Yew! is a joke. It was not intended to be taken seriously, although some people proved Poe’s Law correct by doing so.
So, that’s it. The word fuck probably dates to the fourteenth century, if not earlier, and was definitely in place by the late fifteenth. It is likely a late borrowing into English from another Germanic language. A taboo word, it’s appearances in the written record are scarce until the late twentieth century, although we know it has been in widespread oral use for centuries.
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