
Source: ilovecharts.tumblr.com
Using Google Books Ngram Viewer, this chart maps the frequency of various swear words in books from 1700-2008.
What awesomebaum said. The medial s looks a lot like an f. Many of the scans have accompanying text files, but I’ve found that these aren’t especially accurate either. Also, while there are a lot of neat things on Google Books, it’s not even close to being a complete set of data. But it’s an interesting study. :) I’d love to see this broken down by genre.
not to ruin it for you
but when google digitalizes the text, all of old school Ss look like fs
so it’s quite possible that all the “fucks” they’re logging are actually sucks
which is quite unfortunate
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