This Historian Claims to Have Found the First F*ck Ever Given

Fuck. It turns out we might have been wrong about the age and origins of everyone's favorite word. While it's pretty fucking hard to pin down the exact lineage of the word—sources point to its first usage in the late-1500s to late-1300s—a historian believes he has found the first fuck ever given. Fuck yeah, historian!

Dr. Paul Booth of Keele University has found the name "Roger Fuckebythenavele" (which we need to bring back ASAP; sorry, Jayden) in Chester county court plea rolls from December 8, 1310, medievalists.netreports.

"This surname is presumably a nickname," Booth said. "I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word 'dimwit' i.e. a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it."

Part of the reason scholars debate the first fuck ever given is that other mentions of the word could be spellings of names, or meaning to strike or soldier—rather than anything sexual.

On her blog, linguist Kate Wiles wrote last year that the earliest known fuck in the English language was from 1373 with the term "Fockynggroue." As she wrote, this is "the earliest instance of fuck in English used to mean doing the funny downstairs business. It's a name akin to Lovegrove rather than one which uses the Old English personal name Focca which appears in the place-name Fockbury, or from Old English Folca as in Folkestone."

If Booth's discovery is accurate, that means we've been saying fuck about 63 years longer than we previously thought. And in the last 205 years, the term has evolved to include beautiful phrases like "absofuckinglutely," "bumblefuck," "clusterfuck," "fuckboy," "fuckbuddy," "fuckface," and oh so fucking many more. 

Like "fuckery," from the opening moments of this Amy Winehouse gem. Damn, we miss her.