expletive

UK/ɪkˈspliːtɪv/US/ˈɛksplətɪv/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: expletives

An expletive is a rude word blurted out in anger or pain. The thing you say when the hammer misses.

It is the formal term, which is why court reports and broadcast notices use it, and the phrase expletive deleted became famous from the Watergate transcripts. Linguistics has a completely separate technical sense, since an expletive is also a word filling a grammatical slot without meaning, like the it in it is raining. Swear word is the plain everyday term.

Definitions of expletive

1nounexpletiveA swear word, especially one uttered in anger or pain.C2
“He dropped the tray and let out an expletive.”

Also accepted in games: swear word, curse

Where it comes from

An expletive is a filler. Latin explētīvus meant serving to fill out, from expleō, to fill, so the word names the padding and not the rudeness.

Latin
explētīvus — serving to fill out
English, today
expletive

Built from

expleō · Latin — fill out
ex · Latin — out, completely

From Latin explētīvus (“serving to fill out”), from Latin explētus, the perfect passive participle of expleō (“fill out”), itself from ex (“out, completely”) + *pleō (“fill”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 34 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

expletive in the wild

Bullshit (sometimes bullshite or bullcrap) is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S.
Bullshit
In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive.
Bullshit
Bloody, as an adjective or adverb, is an expletive attributive commonly used in British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand English.
Bloody
Public use continued to be seen as controversial until the 1960s, but the word has since become a comparatively mild expletive or intensifier.
Bloody
Expletive infixation is a process by which an expletive or profanity is inserted into a word, usually for intensification.
Expletive infixation

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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