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This Web site is run by Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer and language expert.

Introduction

I am Jesse Sheidlower, the author of The F-Word, a detailed history of the word fuck; and the President of the American Dialect Society. I have been an editor for Random House Dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary; I have been profiled on the front page of the New York Times and on 60 Minutes, and New York Magazine has named me one of the 100 smartest people in New York. For more about me, you can read my About page, see links to some of my writings, or see some of my press coverage.

Previous site info

I used to be an editor in the Reference Department at Random House, and from 1996 to the time I left in 1999 I wrote a language column called "Jesse's Word of the Day," which was based at this current Web address (i.e. jessesword.com). A book based on these columns also referred to this address in its title. After I left Random House, the column was retitled "Mavens' Word of the Day," with entries written by other editors.

Those columns remain the property of Random House, and I do not have the right to put them up on this site. The Random House Reference Department was disbanded in November 2001, but the archive of the Word of the Day site remained supported until around 2008. Since then, the WotD site has been only sporadically live; your best plan would be to find the site at The Internet Archive. In either case, unsigned entries before October 1999 were written by me; signed entries after that date were written by the named editor.

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.