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I need to avoid swearing or profanity in a text. For obvious reasons I wouldn't be very happy to look for words that should be banned for myself. Do you know a good source, as big as possible, to help me out?

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Can you be a bit more specific. What application will it be used in etc? – Diago Sep 8 '09 at 7:56
I'd like to exchange the 'bad' words with funny or harmless ones in a chat client – Pascalo Sep 8 '09 at 10:58
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5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Are you aware of the problems usually caused by profanity filters and their ultimate futility?

If this is your own idea, try to find a better solution. If it's someone else's idea, advise them of the problems before you waste any work on something both useless and harmful.

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it will be used in a chat client as a fun project. so i don't think it will harm anyone. thanks for the warning though – Pascalo Sep 8 '09 at 11:02
If it's for fun, don't do this. It will harm you sooner or later because people will be complaining about banned messages. Others will search and find ways to circumvent your filter. – innaM Sep 8 '09 at 11:26
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Citing from one of my linked articles: "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny" – Michael Borgwardt Sep 8 '09 at 12:02
Downvoted - While it's true, and good advice, there are some sensible uses of these lists. Links to lists are a better answer to the original question. – Andrew M Dec 23 '09 at 17:09
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up vote 5 down vote

If you are looking for common profanities or offensive words, you can try BannedWordList.com.

You can also try the Wiki page on "profanity" - they have a couple of good lists there.

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BannedWordList.com also has links to other sites with other lists, such as banbuilder.com – Andrew M Dec 23 '09 at 17:07
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up vote 2 down vote

That's quite a tricky question since profanity is a very localised thing. For instance there are very different interpretations to words in British English to American English. This even happens regionally within countries.

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There has to be a starting point somewhere - start off with a list of common profanities, then move up the ladder and add on to the list as you go along. – caliban Sep 8 '09 at 8:20
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My point is more a case that some words that are in common use in American English are profane in British English and vice versa. Which language are you looking at? – Col Sep 8 '09 at 8:31
Anyway after a bit of googling jivesoftware.com/jivespace/docs/DOC-1906 the search that seemed to give the best results was "comprehensive list of profanities" – Col Sep 8 '09 at 8:39
E.g. the word "slut" means "end" in Danish, where the English meaning is a 'bit' different. A friend of mine lost a mail from his grandmother because she finishes her mails with the word "end." Filtering based on a banned word list always gives false positives and are always circumventable. – bjarkef Sep 8 '09 at 9:56
I see. Well I think it's not possible to get ALL bad words. I was looking to get just the most popular ones. Thanks Col for the link – Pascalo Sep 8 '09 at 11:00
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up vote 0 down vote

It may be impossible to ban profanity. Consider The Untold History of Toontown's SpeedChat

"We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."

"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

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up vote 0 down vote

There's an amusing list of banned words that was found in the Mortal Kombat 9 game for PS3:

http://lo-ping.org/2011/04/19/config-data-for-mk9-for-ps3/

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