The most common swear word in each language

In five of the eight sets of film and television subtitles we counted, the most-said strong swear word is the word for sh*t: Spanish mierda, French merde, Portuguese merda in both Brazil and Portugal, and German Scheiße. Italian is the exception. Its commonest swear word is cazzo, said 769.5 times per million words, which makes it the 173rd most common word in Italian dialogue and the most-said single swear word in any of the eight. English, with every form of f*ck added up, is the only one that passes it. Mandarin's is 他妈的 (tā mā de).

Updated 15 October 2026 · 10 min read

This page counts words; it is not advice to use them. English swear words are starred, as everywhere on this site. The words of other languages are printed as they are said, because a learner needs to recognise them.

The most-said swear word in eight languages

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words of subtitles. All eight top words are inside the first 331 words of their language by frequency. A learner who watches films will meet them in the first hour.

Italian: cazzo, and its polite stand-in

Cazzo is said 2.4 times as often as merda. Treccani's dictionary marks it vulgar, gives its literal meaning as the penis, and notes how often it is used simply to strengthen a question: che cazzo fai? is "what the f*ck are you doing?". That job, turning any question into an angry one, is why the count is so high.

Italian also has a clean version. Cavolo is literally a cabbage, and Treccani records it in popular expressions as a euphemism standing in for a coarse word: fatti i cavoli tuoi! is "mind your own business". It is said 185.5 times per million words, though some of those, of course, are cabbages.

English: three forms, nearly level

As single spellings, the three commonest English swear words are almost tied: sh*t at 372.0 per million, f*ck at 354.0 and f*cking at 316.9. Added up by family, f*ck and its forms come to 811.1, which is 1.9 times sh*t and bullsh*t together.

English is also the only language here that is not mostly translated. The other seven lists are largely subtitles of English-language films, so their swearing is partly a record of how translators handle English swearing.

German: Scheiße and scheiß-

German uses its word two ways. The noun Scheiße is said 412.2 times per million words; Duden's dictionary labels it derb, coarse. And scheiß- is a prefix that can be put in front of almost any noun, as in Scheißwetter, "sh*tty weather"; written on its own in subtitles, it adds another 144.2. The milder verdammt, "damn", is nearly as common as the two together, at 541.3.

German subtitles also leave English in. English f*ck and f*cking, left untranslated, are said 35.9 times per million words of German, one more English loan to set beside the fourteen we counted in German, French and Spanish.

Spanish: mierda, then maldito

Mierda is said 523.4 times per million words, and the Real Academia's dictionary marks it malsonante, its label for coarse words. Close behind is not a swear word in the strong sense at all: maldito, "damned", with maldita and maldición, at 481.5. That is the mark of translation. English damn and goddamn need a Spanish equivalent again and again, and maldito is the one subtitlers reach for.

The strong words come well after: joder and its forms at 149.8, carajo at 98.4 and coño at 52.6. The academy's dictionary marks all three malsonante. Slang that varies by country is the subject of regional Spanish slang.

Portuguese: merda on both sides of the Atlantic

Merda leads in Brazil (401.4) and in Portugal (500.2). The runners-up differ. Brazil's is porra (185.4), which Priberam's dictionary marks as taboo slang with an exclamation of annoyance among its uses. Portugal's is the verb foder with the exclamation foda-se (163.7). Brazilian subtitles also use droga for "damn"; it is left out of the ranking because it is the ordinary word for a drug as well.

French: merde, then putain

Merde (381.2) and putain (269.6) are the two a learner will hear constantly. How Le Robert labels each of them, and the rest of the casual vocabulary around them, is in French slang you will actually hear.

Mandarin: 他妈的

他妈的 is literally "his mother's". CC-CEDICT glosses it as a taboo curse, "damn it!" or "f*cking", and like cazzo it is used to strengthen whatever follows. Next come 该死 (gāisǐ, "damn", 296.3) and 混蛋 (húndàn, "b*stard", 237.5).

Several of the Mandarin words read like translations, because they are. 狗屎 is "dog sh*t", and CC-CEDICT gives it the meaning "bullsh*t": it is the subtitler's answer to an English word. For swearing in a Chinese language that is not translated from English, see Shanghainese swear words.

Every word we counted

"At most" marks a ceiling: 操 (cào) is a strong swear word, and the same character, read cāo, is the ordinary verb "to operate" or "to drill". Droga is a ceiling for the reason given above.

Which language swears most?

The count cannot answer that, for three reasons.

• Translation. Seven of the eight lists are mostly translated American and British dialogue. They show how each language's subtitlers render English swearing, and subtitlers soften, shorten and leave things out.
• The basket. The total for a language depends on which words are put in it. We have listed every word counted, so the choice can be checked, but a different list would give different totals.
• The spread is small. The top word of the lowest language, Mandarin, is said 334.4 times per million words; the highest, English, 811.1. That is a factor of 2.4, across languages with very different ways of swearing.

What the count does show is which word a learner will hear first. Insults aimed at women, and slurs of any kind, are left out of every table: this is a count of expletives.

For learners

Recognise these words, and leave them alone until you know the company well. A swear word is the hardest kind of vocabulary to use correctly in a second language, because its strength depends on who is listening, and a learner cannot yet judge that. The dictionary labels are the best guide: malsonante in Spanish, volgare in Italian, vulgaire in French, derb in German and tabuísmo in Portuguese all mean "not in polite company".

The harmless small words of conversation, which are far more useful to copy, are counted in filler words in other languages. The commonest words of each language are in the lists for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Mandarin; Verbavia (our own course) teaches from those lists, free on the web. The lists include the commonest of these words, marked vulgar, because a learner will hear them.

Sources

• Treccani, Vocabolario on line: cazzo (vulgar; the penis; frequent in fixed phrases and as an intensifier in questions), merda, stronzo, cavolo (in popular expressions, a euphemistic substitute for a coarse word), vaffanculo, coglione.
• Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española: mierda, joder, carajo, coño, cabrón — each marked malsonante.
• Priberam, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa: merda, porra, caralho, foder (with foda-se), cabrão, cu.
• Duden: Scheiße (derb), verdammt, Arsch, Arschloch, ficken, verflucht.
• Le Robert, Dictionnaire en ligne: merde, putain, con, connard, chier, bordel, foutre, cul.
• CC-CEDICT, entries 他妈的, 该死, 混蛋, 操, 狗屎, 见鬼 and 王八蛋. cc-cedict.org
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every count is computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and printed from its output rather than typed: each word's count, with its listed forms added up, divided by the total of all counts in that language's list.