(Newser) – Men will now have the perfect response the next time someone tells them to watch their language around ladies. A new study finds women—British women, at least—are more likely to utter the F-bomb than men. Surprised? Researchers aren't. As part of a larger study of the English language to be completed in 2018, they surveyed 376 people and found women said "f---" 167 times out of every million words in the early 1990s, while men said the word 1,000 times per million words. As of 2014, however, female use of the word had jumped more than 300% to 546 times per million words, while men cut their use nearly in half, to 540 times per million words, Refinery29 reports, per the Times, which labels women the "swearer sex."

Women are also more likely than men to say "sh--," say researchers at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press. This was also the case in the 1990s, when women said the swear word four times as often as men. But today women say "sh--" 10 times as often as men. "It looks like there were a set of men who said [the f-word] a lot in the nineties and they influenced the women to do it, and then it leveled," says a researcher, who credits advances in equality with overturning the idea that "there are things which men and women should or should not say." "Gentlemanly behavior and ladylike language is becoming something of the past." Don't swear? The Telegraph has seven reasons why you should start. (Here's the earliest known use of the f-word.)

