Kim Sears, then Andy Murray’s fiancée, aims a volley of four-letter words at his opponent, Tomas Berdych, in Melbourne last year

A unique survey of the swearing habits of men and women over the past 20 years has revealed that not only is the English language constantly discovering new ways to be rude, but women are using the f-word more often than men.

With the help of 376 volunteers who submitted recordings of up to three hours of their daily conversations, British researchers have amassed a language database of 10m words. Half of them have been transcribed so far.

The full results will not be published until 2018, but the most striking conclusions so far confirm that men are no longer the champs when it comes to effing and blinding.

Data from the 1990s showed that men used the f-word 1,000 times per million words; women