The most popular four-letter swear word in English is often said to be an abbreviation of the phrase fornication under consent of the king. We decided to check if this is true.

This letter combination has many decodings: fornication under the command of the king (“fornication at the command of the king”), fornication under crown knowledge (“fornication with the knowledge of the crown”) and the already mentioned above fornication under consent of the king (“fornication with the permission of the king”). Either the king gave his subjects permission to have sex, or encouraged them to engage in it after the plague that ravaged the country, or this inscription adorned the stigma of prostitutes. And many other, absolutely fantastic versions. One even ended up on an educational website begin-english.ru.

We have to disappoint: the earliest such decoding dates back to the 1960s. And this is not surprising, because abbreviations became fashionable only in the 20th century. So here we can talk, at best, about a backronym - a new decoding of an already existing word.

At the same time, there is no one indisputable version of the origin of the word fuck. Many linguists find its connection convincing with verbs such as German ficken (“to copulate”), Dutch fokken (“to multiply”), as well as Norwegian fukka and Swedish focka with a similar meaning. The prevailing view is that the English word appeared later.

The first mention of the word fuck in English written sources dates back to 1310–1311. The name of one Roger Fuckebythenavele is preserved in court records. Most likely, it was the nickname of a man who tried to enter into a vicious relationship through the navel (navel - English), whatever that means, for which he was convicted.

Other experts believe that the victorious march of the word in literature began with the anonymous 15th-century poem Flen flyys, in which an obscene line is presented in encrypted form. And the reason for the encryption was not at all the obscenity of the expression - it was just that the line accused very specific monks of violating celibacy.

Well, the adjective fucking (“damn”) is first found in the margins of the manuscript of Cicero’s treatise “On Duties,” rewritten in 1528. At this point, the scribe gave a strong word to the abbot, who apparently entrusted him with such tedious work.

The word entered the lexicon not only of ordinary people. In 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson used it to tell the Greek ambassador: “To hell with your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If two fleas bite an elephant every now and then, he will simply smack them with his trunk.”