Legal

Content & Acceptable Use Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-23

Swear Atlas documents language. Inclusion of a word or phrase does not constitute endorsement or encouragement of its use.

What Swear Atlas is for

Swear Atlas exists for legitimate reasons, including:

• identifying unfamiliar language you heard but can't spell;
• understanding something that was said to or about you;
• translation and linguistic or cultural education;
• understanding how strong or context-dependent a term is;
• enjoying the humour and variety of ordinary profanity around the world.

Ordinary profanity vs. sensitive terminology

There is a real difference between ordinary swearing — expletives, scatological words, sexual-origin profanity, funny insults — and language whose purpose is to attack people for who they are: racial and ethnic slurs, religious hatred, homophobic and transphobic slurs, ableist slurs, other attacks on protected groups, extremist terminology, and threats.

Ordinary profanity is treated with curiosity and humour. It can be searched, browsed, recommended and, where suitable, put on merchandise.

How sensitive terms are handled

Highly offensive slurs and similar terms may still be included where they have genuine dictionary or identification value — because someone may need to understand what was said to them. But they behave very differently. Sensitive terms are:

• presented soberly, with a clear label, not as entertainment;
• excluded from autocomplete and “as you type” suggestions;
• excluded from browsing, discovery, “popular” and “trending” features;
• excluded from recommendations and “related words”;
• not given indexable pages and not included in our sitemap;
• never eligible for merchandise.

Swear Atlas will still return a sensitive term when you deliberately search for it with enough precision — because you may be trying to identify something you heard. That is identification, not discovery. We will not suggest sensitive terms speculatively, expand a vague query into one, or offer lists of related slurs.

What Swear Atlas is not for

Swear Atlas does not exist to:

• promote hatred or discrimination;
• encourage harassment;
• teach people how to attack protected groups;
• promote extremist ideology;
• facilitate threats or incitement;
• sell hate-oriented merchandise.

Using the Site to do any of these things is prohibited. Language can be documented without being promoted — and that's the line we hold.

Merchandise standards

Only a conservative subset of ordinary, good-natured entries is ever eligible for merchandise. Slurs, hate terms, threats and comparable content are never eligible, regardless of demand. Our print partner also applies its own content rules.

Questions about this policy? Contact us at hello@swearatlas.com.