You don’t have to walk real far to hear a curse word in America. Hell, you don’t have to leave the home quite often. But when it comes to foul language, where does the U.S. rank among global potty-mouths?
Right at the effin’ top of the list, of course.
Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland got curious about which country was the foulest mouthed, so they looked at social media posts made between 2006 and 2023 from people in the U.S, U.K. and Australia. Specifically, they examined which country dropped the f-bomb the most frequently.
It wasn’t even close.
The U.S. showed the highest frequency of use for that word, coming in…
You don’t have to walk real far to hear a curse word in America. Hell, you don’t have to leave the home quite often. But when it comes to foul language, where does the U.S. rank among global potty-mouths?
Right at the effin’ top of the list, of course.
Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland got curious about which country was the foulest mouthed, so they looked at social media posts made between 2006 and 2023 from people in the U.S, U.K. and Australia. Specifically, they examined which country dropped the f-bomb the most frequently.
It wasn’t even close.
The U.S. showed the highest frequency of use for that word, coming in at more than twice that of second place United Kingdom. Australia, despite its reputation for being a somewhat salty-mouthed land, showed the lowest high-frequency usage, something that shocked the researchers.
"The high frequency in the American data and the low frequency of f–k in the Australian data are surprising, as Australians are often perceived as prolific swearers, and swearing in public domains in the USA has been argued to be less tolerated than in Australia," they wrote. "This seems not to hold in digital spaces."
Ah, but the Aussies were a lot more creative in their use of the word, the study found, coming up with more variants. The swearers from that country found an impressive 2,160 different ways to spell f—k, including iterations such as “f–knicolor,” “furkers,” “fuqqen,” “fukkeng,” “fark” and “feck.”
That gives researchers hope that Australia might rise to the top of the profane mountain down the road.
"It will be interesting to see in future studies of whether Australians prefer other swear word alternatives," they write.
Americans might say it more, but the study found that we’re a lot less creative — though we do sometimes draw the word out, adding several u’s to our spelling or adding onto it with words like "f—kface" or "f—kwit."
Collectively, the study found that the f-bomb was more likely to be a part of the conversation on social media than it was on blogs or other mediums. And people are much less likely to use it when conversing with acquaintances versus close friends.