Word.ws English Dictionary

expletive deleted

expletive deleted noun: an all-purpose profanity.

Noun

expletive deleted (countable and uncountable, plural expletive deleteds or expletives deleted)

  1. (euphemistic, humorous) An all-purpose profanity.
    • His most graphic threat was should I ever commit such a grave violation of his privacy, he would "rip your (string of expletives deleted) head off and (expletives deleted meaning "to defecate") down your (string of expletives deleted) neck."2000, John W. Myers, The Crossland Shootout, Adventures of a Photojournalists, page 64
    • Because you sold him out just to have a martyr, you expletive deleted.2013, J. David Markham, Mike Resnick, History Revisited: The Great Battles, Eminent Historians Take on the Great Works of Alternative History, . BenBella Books, →ISBN, page 41

Adjective

expletive deleted (not comparable)

  1. (euphemistic, humorous) An all-purpose profanity.
    • You are paid a lot of money; kindly do some expletive-deleted work.2003, Toby Miller, “What It Is and What It Isn’t: Cultural Studies Meets Graduate Student Labor”, in Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, editors, Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving...

Verb

expletive deleted

  1. (euphemistic, humorous, rare) To have sex with.
    • I’d like to expletive deleted you.
      Oh, expletive, that’s what I’d like to do.1993, Steve Allen, Make ’em laugh, Prometheus Books, page 293
    Synonyms:
    discuss Uganda, get into someone's pants, someone's etchings, copulate with

Synonyms of expletive deleted

Forms of expletive deleted

pluralexpletive deleteds
pluralexpletives deleted

Origin of expletive deleted

Attested since at least the 1930s, but popularized in the U.S. after the Watergate scandal, during which transcripts of conversations were published with profanity replaced by “[EXPLETIVE DELETED]”.

Questions about expletive deleted

What does expletive deleted mean?
Expletive deleted means an all-purpose profanity.
What part of speech is expletive deleted?
Expletive deleted can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
What is the plural of expletive deleted?
The plural of expletive deleted is expletive deleteds.

Words near expletive deleted in the dictionary

  1. explementary angles
  2. explements
  3. explete
  4. expletion
  5. expletive
  6. expletive deleted
  7. expletive deleteds
  8. expletive infixation
  9. expletively
  10. expletiveness
  11. expletives

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: expletive deleted (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-expletive deleted.wav.

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