This is not a grawlix. It’s a grawlix emoji.
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.
Alex Good 
The drawing of lady bountiful is pretty awful, in the 3rd frame on particular. Im adding grawlix to my dictionary. Spellcheck turns it into ‘trawling’ so it hasn’t caught up with the Scrabble dictionarists yet.
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Yeah, I’ve had a few of these new words I’ve discovered be rejected by spell check. But mostly because they’re old and obscure. This is the first new one. They need to stay current!
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Interesting. I had no idea there was a word for it. I love that there is though 😀
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This is an educational blog! And knowing is pi/6.18 of the battle.
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Ohhhh, getting clever with pi. I’ll take a slice of lemon meringue while you’re serving it out please….
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You can have up to half a pi.
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Oh, I don’t want to be greedy. 1/17th is good enough for me…
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And I used to read Beetle Bailey in the newspaper every morning while I ate my Quisp cereal with the milk we still had delivered to our front door. How bout them #!&% apples?
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Apples, or a box of navel oranges?
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