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Mind your language

Fuckebythenavele

24 September 2015

1:00 PM

24 September 2015

1:00 PM

A great discovery has been made by Dr Paul Booth, a fellow of Keele University. It is a 14th-century example of fuck. We might think the word Anglo-Saxon, but it’s hard to find written examples before the 16th century. Chaucer never uses it. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a poem from 1500 in the surprising form gxddbov.

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