You probably can’t pronounce the title of this post, but you know what it means. What you may not know is that it has a name. It’s called a grawlix.

The word grawlix was coined by the late cartoonist Mort Walker, who created the comic strip Beetle Bailey. Walker invented a lot of terms relating to comics (like “briffit” for a cloud of dust to show a character’s sudden movement, or “plewds” for drops of sweat shed from someone who is stressing out), but I think grawlix is the only one that’s stuck.

The use of grawlixes long preceded Walker’s giving it a name though. It’s generally regarded that the first example came in the comic strip Lady Bountiful in 1901. It looked like this:

The definition of grawlix is the use of typographical symbols to replace profanity. Hence it is sometimes also referred to as an “obscenicon.” I got that definition from Wikipedia but I could have taken something similar from a dictionary since as of 2018 Merriam-Webster added grawlix to their lexicon and in 2022 it made it into The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Which must have pleased Scrabble players because it’s always nice to have another “X” word to play.

Words, words, words