A banned word list representing a collection of many lists from around the web of words considered socially unacceptable for one reason or another.

What to do with a banned word list? Use this dirty word list to screen for spammers and griefers, to censor dissidents; to better understand the semiotic role of taboo signifiers in an online modality; to monitor user feedback on a website; or just to improve your vocabulary.

How proper are Twitter users in San Francisco versus San Antonio? Try incorporating a Twitter API to research the occurrence of dirty word Tweets between cities or across cultures. Looking for an acceptable word list?

Contents

The banned word collection includes:

• The Seven Dirty Words you Can’t Say on Television from the research group of George Carlin
• About 400 English indecent words from http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net
• Multilingual banned word list from http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net
• More than 1,100 words the NFL refuses to print on licensed merchandise
• A short banned word list, purportedly forbidden in AOL Chat Rooms
• About 800 questionable keywords from the REVEAL software package
• About 200 obscene words removed from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.
• Banned word lists pulled from a variety of filtering libraries on github.com
• An assortment of smaller dirty word lists, organized by source

Depending on how you count, there are about 5,000 different ways to shock your grandmom in this dataset.

Digression

A funny story about the scrabble one… In the late 90s, the official reference for legal scrabble words was the “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary vol 2”. Scrabble is, of course, used as a teaching tool in many elementary and secondary schools, and this caused people to worry about the corrupting influence of words like BAZOOMS and BADASS (and much worse besides, but still). A committee was formed; they identified a couple hundred offensive words that were removed from the next edition.

Those words were still legal in tournament play though! This meant that for the next couple years, scrabble tournament players received along with their information packet a list of obscene, racist, insulting and/or titillating words, specifically to assure the curious that those were A-OK to use. Hooray Society! (See also: this XKCD comic)

Some food for thought:

• Anti-defamation League
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Judith Martin (Miss Manners) on Vulgarity

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