MALEDICTA LINKS International Web Sites Specializing in Insults, Curses, Slang, Swearwords, Blasphemies, Slurs, Obscenities and Vulgarities Note: Unfortunately, many of the links below are dead, because the authors changed their URLs without informing me, left the WWW, or have died. [Updated 15 April 2008] I have found or been notified by friends of the maledicta-related Web sites listed and annotated below. Their quality ranges from amateurish to excellent and scholarly. Some are limited to one language, such as English, German or Swedish, others are multilingual with English translations and pronunciation guides. If you know of others, in any language, please let me know, so that I can update this listing. New links are continually added at the bottom of this page. If you find dead links, please let me know. The British magazine Uploaded [Link now dead, Aug. 2002] maintains a web site of mixed contents. It features sounds, chats, lots of graphics, but is marred by stupid web-authoring (some bloody git wrote many words in yellow or pale turquoise on a white background, thus making the text illegible). One section is Talking Bollocks, where you can leave a (vulgar) message and get (offensive) replies from others. The Swearing Archive is divided into (1) Bodily Functions, (2) Sexual, (3) Bodily Parts, and (4) Miscellaneous Abuse. You can enter your own words or phrases, with or without sounds (.wav files), and explain or define your contribution. Quite amateurish but a useful source of mainly British slang, such as gristle gripper = vagina. Related sections deal with British perverts and feature photos of British titties. How to Swear in German!, formerly called Dirty Crap to Say in German, is an excellent site. It's a glossary of some 50 words, each with usage sentences in German and English translations. All entries have .wav sound files, spoken by a woman. This site is linked to others dealing with assorted crap and shit. Sweary Mary's Dictionary of Filth! (now renamed Roger Mellie's Roger's Profanisaurus) is another British site of high quality. It's a searchable A-Z database, to which you can add your own terms. The entries have often extensive comments, lists of synonyms, etymological notes, usage examples, and equivalents in other languages. The original site disappeared in 2007, but an earlier version of the Profanisaurus is here and it's now available as a book. You Eat Like A Pig [Link now dead, Aug. 2002] is an Australian site maintained by Andrés Gómez de Silva Garza that presents translations of this phrase into 56 languages. All entries lack diacritical marks (accents, tildes, umlauts, etc.). It would be better if the words had the proper accents and special characters, most of which are available in HTML, such as à, å, æ, ç, ê, ï, ñ, ó, ø, ß, and ü. More constructive nitpicking: it would also help if the "you" were explained: is the insult aimed at a male or a female? At one target or more? Is it the polite = formal form (Sie, vous, usted) or the familiar = informal (du, tu, thou)? There are also languages that have the dual ("you two"); others, such as Japanese, have an elaborate system of politeness resulting in dozens of versions; and still others use different words depending on whether the phrase is spoken by a man or a woman. To illustrate, here are the different versions in German, with varying pronouns, verbs and nouns, all depending on the target: Du frisst wie eine Sau! (or wie ein Schwein!) = familiar, single target, male or female Ihr fresst wie Säue! = familiar, plural targets, male or female Sie fressen wie eine Sau! = polite, single target, male or female Sie fressen wie Säue! = polite, plural targets, male or female.    The point is, this could become the site on the Internet for this insulting phrase, if more grammatical and usage information, proper spelling, and various versions were supplied.    UPDATE: I'm pleased to report that some of my suggestions were implemented: extensive notes have been added to explain the choices of formality and the sex of the speaker and target. Because HTML does not have all diacritical marks and some original contributors can no longer be contacted, the compiler has decided to leave off all accent marks. In the Web Forum - Personal Slanders and Verbal Assaults, you can post insults and flames to insulting messages. American Slanguages is a simple listing of local and regional words and phrases from 45 American cities and regions, such as Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island. There are additional listings of slanguages from Australia, England, Canada, Ireland, and South Africa. Hans-Christian Holm's The Alternative Dictionaries is one man's most ambitious undertaking to collect insults, curses, obscenities, vulgarities and the like from as many languages as possible. There are some 3,100 entries in 119 languages, and new contributions are solicited. Some language "dictionaries" have only one entry, others have hundreds. The same variance exists in the quality of the entries supplied by readers, ranging from excellent to sub-amateurish. Spelling and pronunciation guides are sometimes supplied, again very unevenly. The same word from a language with non-Latin writing may be transliterated as "coos" and a few lines later as "kus." Mr. Holm is aware of the limitations of his TAD, asks for help from language experts to improve the quality, and plans on establishing uniform transliteration and pronunciation systems. This project is, despite its current limitations, most promising and could become the authoritative source for maledicta worldwide on the Internet. The author is frustrated by the primitive HTML (no IPA symbols) and lack of time. The Canonical List of International Swearing is another extensive listing (inferior to Holm's) of very uneven quality and with many typos and mistakes, but still worthwhile, of all kinds of maledicta in French, Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Cantonese, Mandarin, Indonesian, Malay, Japanese, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Bengali, Yiddish, Jamaican, Bavarian, Hokkien, Gaelic, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Tamil, Estonian, Arabic, and Hindi (in this order). Entries supplied by readers range from one per language to hundreds. Some have home-made pronunciation guides; some give detailed usage and grammatical information, while others add only the English translation. After the List follows an extensive body of additions and corrections supplied by newsgroup readers. Fredrik Wartenberg's and Günther Knoblich's German Swearword Generator is a Macintosh-only program that produces thousands of spoken insults consisting of random combinations of adjectives and nouns, similar to a ca. 15-year-old PC program that generated printed random insults in the millions. The German insults are spoken by a woman with the vocal skills of an old Hamburg Harbor Whore, as I admiringly informed the authors. I speak from experience, having been yelled at by whores in the Hamburg Harbor district, when I inspected it as a youngster: "Du ... du kleiner Scheißkerl, hau ab!" ("Beat it, you ... you little shit!"). Currently the insults are in standard North German, but similar generators could be produced for the many German dialects of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxemburg. A limited version of this Insult Generator (Schimpfwortgenerator) can be downloaded from two sites. Note: All the excellent pages below created by Anne and Johan Santesson exist no longer. Johan died in May 2001, and with him, all that wonderful material in Dutch, Swedish and Afrikaans has disappeared. R.I.P., Johan! [Sept. 2003] An Easy Guide to Swedish Cursing, also named Cursing in Swedish: How to Be Abusive in the Swedish Language, is Johan and Anne Santesson's excellent site (with English, Swedish and Dutch home pages). This collection is the best of this group and so well organized and rich in material that I have asked the authors' permission to publish it later in Maledicta. All words and phrases have .wav sounds, so you can hear all of them spoken by a male or female voice. The site is divided into eight chapters of religious (Devil, Hell, God, Damned) and non-religious (Hangman, Scatology, Sexual) curses, swearwords, insults, and rude and abusive terms. There is a wealth of usage examples, as well as cultural and linguistic explanations and information -- the kind of quality you find only in our Maledicta journal. This superb collection has only one flaw: the authors shun ethnic and racial terms of abuse because,"Ethnic curses are, of course, absolutely unacceptable even in coarse or vulgar language." (I disagree -- a scholar must not let his/her personal feelings or contemporary political correctness interfere with the collection of all material, as nasty as it may be.) The authors show how such abusive terms can be formed with prefixed or suffixed words, but end there. This is a lamentable lacuna in the Santessons' outstanding corpus which some other Swede should fill.    Note: The authors have explained to me why they have to avoid featuring ethnic slurs. It's not because of prudery but for professional reasons. UPDATE The Alternative Dictionaries (TAD) is the best Internet collection of uncensored slang from about 120 languages (see above), established and maintained by Hans-Christian Holm in Norway. Mr. Holm is looking for a host that can handle much traffic (127,000 hits in March 1997 alone!). He prefers a non-commercial (academic) host but, to continue his valuable work, he would accept a commercial host who in return for his services may display some advertising.    The host should be able to maintain most parts of a web site from afar but also have a person with physical access to the host who would like to be involved in the technical aspects of this project. Mr. Holm can provide a detailed description of the system and what is required, such as an "NT Server" running the latest version on "Internet Information Server."    There are no costs involved for the host other than the NT Server itself. Everything that will be installed, including the Internet Information Server, is either free or produced by Mr. Holm with licensed software.    If you know of a possible host for this unique site, please contact Mr. Holm at <h.c.holm@notam.uio.no>. Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang is compiled by William Denton. This is an extensive glossary of words and phrases found in famous American detective novels and gangster films. Excellent, with definitions, sources, and bibliography. Also by Denton, Frankenslang, a glossary of terms and slang used by Old Blue Eyes and compiled mainly from the 1982 The Frank Sinatra Scrapbook by Richard Peters. This is a "clean" glossary that does not represent Sinatra's legendary foul mouth and verbal abuse. Larry's Aussie Slang and Phrase Dictionary is a good, extensive glossary of Australian slang and colorful language, part of a huge site about anything dealing with Australia. Svenska Invektiv by Anne and Johan Santesson is the most ambitious and superlative collection of Swedish terms of abuse in existence. In Swedish only. Hundreds of negative terms are organized into five groups: gender-neutral, anti-woman, anti-male, archaic, and dialectal terms of abuse. The first three categories are subdivided by shortcomings or negative traits, such as people who are deceptive, loutish, stupid, irritable, nasty, cowardly, horny, lazy, greedy, clumsy or slanderous.    Listed under each sub-category (e.g., lazy) are the abusive nouns, further organized into archaic and dialectal terms. Clicking on a word takes you to the alphabetical list of "Archaic Terms" (where the modern Swedish equivalent is shown, together with the source, such as a book and its date of publication) or to the "Dialectal Terms" (stating the region where the term is used). As if this labor of love were not enough, the Santessons have also provided the means to view and print their collection by using "Adobe Acrobat" (see "Vill du ha 'Svenska Invektiv' i bokform?"). To recoup some of the expenses of transmitting the files, the authors ask for a small contribution of less than $1.50, but none of the 500-plus downloaders has paid a cent....    There is much more on their Swedish, Dutch and English web pages, such as Vloeken in het Zweeds, a Swedish-Dutch list of 16 terms of abuse and vulgarities, as well as information on Swedish cooking and on aphrodisiacs. Perhaps excessive use of the last has aged Anne and Johan beyond imagination: if you click on their photos, you'll see the oldest-looking Swedes known to mankind. Vaffanculo! is a good glossary of Italian sexual terms and insults with synonyms and translations into English. Unfortunately, no literal translations are provided in most cases, which is always regrettable. This and the following page are part of the "John Gotti Tribute" Web site established by Ravenna [now closed down]. Also on the Gotti site is the Mobspeak Glossary which lists English and Italian terms with definitions and translations of American Mafia lingo found in The Mafia Handbook. Very good. Off-Color Turkish: A Selection of Swearwords, Vulgarities and Sexual Phrases is part of a large site dedicated to teaching Turkish. Compiled by Jim Masters. You'll have to click around the pages to find what we are interested in, the excellent glossary of Turkish maledicta, with English equivalents, literal translations, explanations, sample phrases, and pronunciation aids, plus 15 RealAudio sound files. The uncensored glossary is divided into "Milder Turkish Swearing" and "Very Bold Turkish." (Thanks, Victor F., for the lead.) Alliterative Religious Euphemisms for Male Masturbation lists some 880 phrases created by contributors. The coined euphemisms should be (a) alliterative and (b) have some religious association, but many do not or are silly. Samples of good ones: Choke the cherub, Jerk the Jesuit, Milk the monk, Pull the Pope, and Stroke Saint Steven's slick slender salami. Warning! During downloading, this file may stall and crash. Synonyms for Masturbation, compiled by Earl Vickers and contributors, lists 644 terms, divided into 76 terms for women's masturbation and 568 for men's. Here is another great list of 466 common and coined synonyms for masturbating, many of which are from George Carlin's famous compilation. Here is yet another list of 121 synonyms for "masturbating," part of the 139K alt.sex.masturbation FAQ by Lars Eighner. See Part III, section 5.1, "Words and Phrases for Masturbation" for these synonyms divided into various groups such as Standard Terms; Verbs; Animal, Plant and Mineral Metaphors; Musical; Meat and Bone; and Juice and Cream. This huge file contains serious information about anything dealing with masturbation. HyperGlot Gobbledygook was created by Matthew Schmeer. For the Macintosh only. The .hqx program downloads from the MIT HyperArchives when you click on the preceding link. This HyperCard-based insult generator randomly combines words from three lists of adjectives and nouns to create insults of varying quality. It rapidly "spews forth" insults until told to stop. The created list can be saved as a text file. Samples of good insults: "You damned fruity tongue-tied donkey!" and "Thou bubbly annoying excrement!" Silly ones: "Thou friendly Polish cream!" and "Kiss my rabid German pudding!" Ken Ilio compiled the excellent "Foul Mouth: Filipino Dirty Words," begun in 1975. This Tagalog-language collection with English translations and comments is divided into (1) Bodily Fluids, Secretions and Excrements, (2) Sex and Body Parts, and (3) Swearwords. Elizabethan Insult Maker is the name of two programs Eric Meier wrote for Macintosh and PC users just for us. It uses the 150 adjectives and nouns listed in "Quickies 4." At each click on a button, a new randomly created insult pops up on the screen. Currently, the self-extracting-archive files of these huge programs (some 1.7MB) are not available, but after Mr. Meier makes them ready to download on his future site, I'll announce it in "Updates." Shakespeare Insult Kit has a similar insult generator using the words swiped from Quickies 4. One has to click on "Insult me again" or "Taunt me a second time" to see a new insult on the screen. If you like to engage in self-abuse -- verbal, that is -- you can find out how to say "I am a dog" in 42 languages. Rob, who compiled this list, does not use diacritical marks; also, some transliterations don't look quite kosher to me. Why Did God Create So Many Assholes? One webmaster of a multi-language site, whose identity I'll keep anonymous to protect him from spamming, told me of the trouble he has with nationalistic, chauvinistic, super-patriotic assholes (my characterization). For example, some Greek viewers become very upset when they find Macedonian or Turkish language examples on his site. In addition to Greek extremists, there are Spaniards who have sent him "incredibly stupid and childish messages" about Catalan and Basque. And a couple of weeks ago, an unknown moron took to extremes and mail-bombed him, filling his e-mail box with nearly 1200 messages! UPDATE: Meanwhile that webmaster has received three more e-mails from "rabid Greeks" who complained, "You have a Macedonian dictionary, but there is no such country. Alexander the Great, who was Greek, etc., etc." -- Another e-mail, this time from a Bulgarian, insisted that "Macedonian is a Bulgarian dialect." The webmaster just sighs, "Why can't these people just shut up and continue picking olives or roses or whatever in peace?" A while ago I found a good distinction between language and dialect: A language is a dialect with an army. The Santessons have done it again! They have put up a tremendous eight-page site about "Cursing in Dutch: A Guide to Strong Language." In addition to the introductory "Dutch Cursing from a Swedish Perspective" in English and Swedish, they present well-organized lists with comments and comparisons between Swedish and Dutch insults and curses dealing with Religion, Prick, Cunt, Arse, Sickness, and Rot. Most of the nouns are used as insults per se or as prefixes and suffixes to form derogatory terms. -- Brava, Anne! and Bravo, Johan! UPDATE: Anne and Johan Santesson have just added a five-part section about cursing and swearing in Afrikaans, consisting of an Overview and maledicta based on Religion, Weather, Sex, and Mixed expressions (including the "mother" type that is not used in any other Germanic language except English), as well as valuable comments about the cursing differences between the closely-related languages Dutch and Afrikaans. Hundreds of Slang Sites Adam Gaffin's "The Wicked Good Guide to Boston English" is a well-done introduction to the pronunciation of Boston slang, with a glossary of words and phrases, as well as place names of the area. Dave Sperling's excellent "ESL (English as a Second Language) Café" is for learners and teachers of English, has an uncensored glossary, usage sentences, and much more. The excellent "Koala" site for things Australian contains an extensive glossary of "Strine" and Australian slang. "Driza-Bone" is a short but useful glossary of Australian Slang. Ben Bolker's British slang glossary, compiled 1992-94, is mainly from the Cambridge University area. It has an uncensored section called "Exclamations, Crudity & Insults." The largest and most scholarly collection of uncensored British slang by Ted Duckworth also includes many colloquialisms and regionalisms. This site features a dictionary (divided into separate alphabetical pages), an introductory essay, a short bibliography of slang dictionaries, and a links page to many other slang sites about British, Australian, New Zealand, French, gay, drug, trucking, biking and black slang. Excellent! The "Dictionary of Decadence" lists slang from Queens, New York. It's incomplete and funky. Prof. Judi Sanders is in charge of the College Slang Research Project at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. The site lists recent college slang dictionaries and has some 60 links to other sites featuring slang glossaries of various regions and specialties. Excerpts from Tom Dalzell's excellent recent book of American slang from the past 70 years, Flappers 2 Rappers. For many years, Alex Thiel has researched German graffiti which contain, of course, slang and taboo language. Here he presents contents and English summaries of his 27 volumes (1983-) and provides links to other graffiti sites. Julie runs a well-organized, extensive site featuring more than one thousand English-language insults, slurs, and sarcastic comments by and against (famous) men and women. Her site also has a large section with some 500 full-deckisms ("He's not playing with a full deck"), as well as other word-related pages of jokes, puns, riddles, wordplay, etc. The anonymous Abuse Generator called Abuse-A-Tron creates random insults (click "reload" for new ones) such as "You eat stuff you find in the catbox, you starched, pus scarfing, frog corrupting, epicurean scion of a nihilistic accountant" and "Your mother was a hamster, you drooling, barf snorting, pig worshipping, seditious suckling of a salivation-empowered pervert." Barry Hurwitz created an Elizabethan Insult Excel spreadsheet from the table of insults in "Quickies 4." It will generate fifty new insults every time it is loaded or when you perform a recalculation. (More information on this may follow.) More British Slang and Regionalisms D. J. Barton's "Words That Could Be Confusing & Embarrassing in the UK and US" lists 200 terms and explains them at various lengths. "Richard Smith's Compendium of Britishisms" is a large collection of words and phrases with short (one-word) definitions. It is divided into General British Phrases and Regional Slang: Birmingham, Cockney and London, Cornish, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester & Northern England, Scottish, and Welsh. Mike Etherington's "English/American Dictionary" is a huge, unalphabetized compilation of British terms with detailed explanations. Sections: Slang, People, Motoring, Clothing, Around the House, Food & Drink, and Everyday Objects. A must for Yanks going to Britain for the first time. "London Slang" by Robert Strudwick contains much general U.K. and U.S. slang (ballistic, barf, blower, dike, dickhead) with simple definitions, but it is especially valuable for its modern rhyming slang, such as "(Sir) Anthony Blunt" (= cunt). Read all about Estuary English, the form of English widely spoken in London and around the Thames Estuary in southeastern England, on the page containing links to articles, monographs, abstracts, bibliography, etc., maintained by Prof. John Wells. The "Aussie Slang Dictionary" is a good, extensive glossary of Australian slang with simple definitions. The French Slang Dictionary by Patrick Lecrosnier is completely in French -- instructions, terms, definitions, sources. It is not a glossary per se but a searchable database of some 18,000 words. I searched ten of the dozens of French colloquial and slang terms for "penis" listed in the excellent, 50,000-word Harrap's Slang Dictionary English-French / French-English, but only one of the ten was in the database. No etymologies are given, but the sources are shown by author and book title. Tom Dalzell, compiler of the excellent decade-by-decade American slang dictionary Flappers 2 Rappers (see above) has just published another major contribution to slang: The Slang of Sin (Merriam-Webster, 1998). This 384-page masterpiece presents the lingo related to alcohol, gambling, drugs, horse racing, sex, crime, prison, pool halls, tobacco, bikers, beggars, and much more. "An tInneal Mallachtaí -- The Curse Engine" produces English and Irish curses by combining a subject, verb and object from three columns of about a dozen each choices. Example: English: May the devil destroy your worthless butt! Irish: Go scriosa an diabhal do thóin bheagmhaitheasach! Phonetic: guh SHKRIH-suh uhn JOWL duh HOH-ihn VYUG-wah-huh-suhkh Frank Wu prepared a Quiz with insults from the verbal sparring between C-3PO and R2-D2 in Lucas's "Star Wars" trilogy special edition. Do you know who called whom a "bumbling bucket of bolts"? Ewoud Sanders and Rob Tempelaars recently published their Krijg de vinkentering! 1001 Nederlandse en Vlaamse verwensingen. Excerpts from this excellent book of 1,300 Dutch and Flemish disease- and death-curses are featured here. Dead link -- site disappeared: "The Bengali Dictionary of Passion, Anger, and Vulgarity" by B. A. promises to become an excellent and exciting glossary of Bengali maledicta. The words and expressions are grouped into chapters such as Body Parts, Insults, Name-calling, Sex, Scatology, and Acts of Love, Passion and Tenderness. The compiler uses labels (poetic, formal, vulgar) and precise definitions, and he provides a detailed guide to transliteration and pronunciation. What I would like to see are literal translations of any entry whose meaning differs from the actual meaning. For example, the Bengali term for "to deflower" is kumArItva nAsh karA, but what do these three words mean literally? Much of the present corpus is standard or formal; there are thousands of (vulgar) slang terms yet to be collected from the various geographical regions where Bengali is spoken -- the hardest part, as most native speakers are too shy or ashamed to admit that they use or know such "bad language." Maledicta-related Web sites that meet my standards of quality are awarded the "Maledicta Seal of Approval" and may display the image to the right on their pages. Professor Dominique Lagorgette (Université de Savoie at Chambéry) is the leading French maledicta scholar. She is an indefatigable author of many maledicta-related articles and co-compiler with Prof. Pierre Larrivée (Aston University) of an extensive polyglot maledicta bibliography. The main page (Pragmasémantique de l'insulte) with some links and much more (all in French) is here and here (with bibliography), and the Bibliography itself ("Insultes, injures, jurons: Essai de bibliographie étendue"), now a 16-page, 284K .pdf (but shown with the extension .php), is here. Charles Boutler is the author of twelve (and growing) excellent bilingual slang glossaries at: http://www.russki-mat.net/ : Russian-French / French-Russian Russian-German / German-Russian Russian-Breton / Breton-Russian French-German / German-French Russian-English Russian-Spanish Russian-Aragonese Russian-Greek There are also LINKS (on the left side of the pages) to two dozen further links, mostly about Russian but also about some French and German books and Websites. To get the most out of these glossaries, you need a browser that can display Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, and IPA characters. Various pages are encoded in "Windows-1252" instead of the international standard, "ISO-8859-1," which may not render characters with diacritics correctly. Despite their general excellence, I have two criticisms to make: First, many translations need also literal translations (not just giving the meaning), so that the users can fully appreciate the crudity or humor of the original terms. Second, and far more troublesome, the translations of obscene, vulgar, and other offensive terms (what linguists call "low-register") are translated as "clean," formal, or euphemistic (high-register) terms. This is a disservice to the users and may get them into trouble, because they are unaware of how offensive or nasty the original terms are. Vulgar terms must be translated as equally vulgar terms in the other language, not as formal ones. Low-register terms for "prick," "cunt," "fuck," and "shit" are translated as high-register "penis," "vulva," "female genitals," "female lower naughty bits," "to engage in sexual intercourse," and "to have a bowel movement." Random examples: -- Russian pizda is not English "female lower naughty bits" but cunt. -- Russian xuy is not English "penis" but prick or cock. -- German wichsen is not French "se masturber" but se branler (to jerk off). -- French baiser is not German Geschlechtsverkehr haben ("to have sexual intercourse") but ficken or vögeln (to fuck). -- French bite and zob are not German Penis but Schwanz (prick, cock). -- French chatte [lit., "female cat"] is not German weibliche Geschlechtsteile ("female genitals") but Fotze or Möse (cunt, pussy). -- French caguer and chier are not German Stuhlgang haben ("to have a bowel movement") but scheißen or kacken (to shit). And so on, in every language I've checked except Breton. It would entail major revisions, additions, corrections and much time, but if Mr. Boutler is willing to put even more time into his terrific glossaries made available gratis to all the Websurfing freeloaders and parasites, his labor of love would be even more valuable than it is.