What common English word was considered too obscene to appear in any major dictionary until 1960?

Question

Accepted Answer

Okay

When "okay" first appeared in Boston newspapers in 1839—as a jokey abbreviation of "oll korrect," a deliberate misspelling of "all correct"—it was part of a fad for humorous abbreviations that included "KY" (know yuse) and "OW" (oll wright). Most of these vanished within months. OK survived only because it got a second life in the 1840 presidential campaign, when supporters of Martin Van Buren formed the "OK Club," riffing on his nickname "Old Kinderhook."

But surviving in popular speech and earning dictionary legitimacy were different battles entirely. For more than a century, prestigious dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary refused to include "okay," viewing it as vulgar cant—the linguistic equivalent of admitting "ain't" or "irregardless." The word was everywhere in conversation, telegrams, and business correspondence, yet lexicographers treated it like a grammatical disease. Webster's finally capitulated in 1960, and the OED followed in 1965, acknowledging what everyone already knew: OK had become the most widely spoken word on Earth.

Today "okay" appears in hundreds of languages virtually unchanged, making it arguably the closest thing we have to a universal word. Astronauts from different nations use it in space, and it's survived precisely because it does something no synonym quite matches—it's simultaneously an adjective, adverb, noun, verb, and interjection, all while carrying an irreplaceable sense of tentative acceptance. What dictionaries once rejected as corrupted slang became the most successful export in the history of the English language.

the word that was too rude to print—until 1960