Drumroll, please: The brand-new fourth edition of The F-Word, the definitive lexicon of the English language’s favorite and most notorious four-letter word, celebrates its publication by Oxford University Press this week. Edited by Jesse Sheidlower, who has shepherded the project since its inception in 1995, the new book is an impressive work of scholarship and an essential addition to the bookshelf of any serious swear-lover.
The first edition, published when Sheidlower was 27 and “one of lexicography’s bright young stars” (per the jacket copy), contained 232 pages. Nearly 30 years later, the new edition comprises 504 pages, more than 150 new entries, almost 150 antedatings (earlier appearances of a word or expression), and more than 2,500 new quotations.
[Read our interview with Jesse Sheidlower]
What will you find in the new fourth edition? A lot more on fuck with, to take just one example. Fuck with didn’t appear at all as a separate entry in the book’s first edition; in the third edition Sheidlower provided only two senses for the term: “to meddle with (maliciously)” and “to tease (playfully).”
It now has six senses, starting with the nonlexicalized literal sense “to have sexual intercourse with,” which Sheidlower had previously omitted “because, well, it’s nonlexicalized, but this time I felt that people might complain about its absence.” You’ll also find the new sense 3, with three subsenses: “to associate with”; “to use; engage with”; and “to like; to appreciate.” Sheidlower comments: “I think these are interesting, and defining and dividing them up was interesting and challenging, and they go back a number of decades and there are a lot of good quotes from good people.” (Newly added senses are highlighted here, but not in the print edition, with a NEW glyph: 🆕.)
Strong Language 