You may remember Jack Grieve’s swear maps of the USA. Now he has a nifty new web app called Word Mapper that lets anyone with an internet connection make use of the raw data behind those maps.

Being a mature grown-up, I put on my @stronglang hat and went searching for swears and euphemisms. What emerged were some intriguing – and visually very appealing – patterns of rude word use in contemporary discourse:

About 60 maps follow, so fair warning: It’s an image-heavy post.

Below are heat maps for: af (as fuck), asf (as fuck), badass, bullshit, cock, crappy, dammit, damnit, damned, dang, dick, dickhead, douchebag, effing, fart, freakin, freaking, frick, frickin, friggin, fuck, fucked, fucker, fuckers, fuckery, fuckin, fucking, fw (fuck with), goddamn, gtfo (get the fuck out), heck, idgaf (I don’t give a fuck), lmfao (laughing my fucking ass off), mf (motherfucker/-ing), mofo, motherfucking, nigga, omfg (oh my fucking god), piss, pissed, pissy, prick, scum, shit, shits, shitty, shittiest, shitting, slutty, stfu (shut the fuck up), sucks, swear, tf (the fuck), twat, turd, wtf (what the fuck), wth (what the hell).

If this is your first visit to Strong Language, welcome.

Multiple meanings aren’t controlled for, so the name Dick is mixed in with vulgar dick, innocuous sucks with slang sucks, emotional freaking with intensifier freaking, and so on. The same goes for abbreviations like af, asf, fw, and mf, which allow for other possibilities, but the sweary usages predominate in US tweets.

Before you ask about asshole, bastard, bitch, crap, cunt, damn, darn, douche, faggot, fuckboy, gosh, hell, motherfucker, pussy, slut, or whore, these all featured in my earlier swear-maps post, which also describes the mapping method Grieve and colleagues used. Fuck and shit are repeated here for comparison (shit vs. shitty is particularly interesting) and because the fuck map is pretty asf.

Cocksucker, curiously, doesn’t make the cut. Nor, less curiously, do arse, bugger, wanker and other taboo terms more characteristic of British English. But I’m sure I missed a few – let me know in a comment. You can click on maps for larger images.

In a comment at Language Log, Grieve said the app should map any string of alphabetic characters in the top 10,000 words in the (8.9-billion-word) corpus. He confirmed to me that this will be extended in due course. Multi-word phrases don’t work yet, but will eventually. For hyphens, use full stops (periods).

Grieve hopes to set up Irish and British versions at some point (excuse me while I omfg) and to make other technical refinements. In the meantime, there’s endless fun to be had with the current US Word Mapper, and it’s impressively fast to use. You can even look up non-swearwords, but there’s a time and a place for that kind of carry-on.