Two alphabetically-ordered word lists based on the British National Corpus.

The first (blue words) is from the 10 million word section of spoken English. Below it you'll find a section from the 90 million word written texts word list. Do you imagine that this taboo word will be more common in spoken or in written English?

Here's the corresponding section from the written text list.

Well then. The word fucking is much more common in spoken English, so it seems. About 20 times more frequent (look at the percentage information in red). But a lot less varied in form! There are many more variations on the theme in writing... What does this tell us about (the) English?

Now here's another screen shot from the BNC Spoken corpus index, showing Mutual Information scores for these words. Look at the words which are most highly associated with each.

Finally, here is part of the concordance output, obtained directly from the WordList index. It shows a nice example of how fucker is used in argument. Kev and his friend aren't arguing about sex but the meaning of words!

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