Q. What’s the best way to format a euphemized profanity like “the f-word”? Should the initial letter of the profanity (in this case “f”) be italicized? Is a hyphen appropriate? Thank you!
A. Italics, maybe; hyphen, yes. We’d start with the entry for the term in Merriam-Webster, where it’s “the f-word” or “the F-word”; the two forms are equal variants, but we usually go with the first-listed term.
Then, considering that dictionaries don’t do italics in their entry words, you could apply Chicago style for letters used as letters and italicize the f—as in f-word. But most editors would probably leave that f alone.
See, for example, The F-Word, edited by Jesse Sheidlower (4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2024), which has “the F-word,” capital F, no hyphen—except on the cover, where the title is in all caps and the actual f-word is spelled out but obscured (except for the F) by what looks like a black Sharpie. On the title page, it’s “The F-Word” (capital F and W), which is in keeping with Chicago’s latest advice on capitalizing hyphenated terms in titles (see CMOS 8.162).
For more advice on handling expletives, see CMOS 6.99. For the grammatical term expletive, see 5.246.