Researching English Vocabulary

Swearing Presentation
By Ana, Jose, Maria and Stephen

The word we will be presenting is.

Word formation processes

Inflection
Derivation
Compounding

Words with similar functions

Etymology
Old English bicce
Germanic only in Old Norse bikkja

German betze and petze

French biche bitch, and biche

The most frequent collocation is son of

a bitch

The collocation Stuck up bitch

means, a girl or a women who is
generally ugly and thinks she is better
than everyone else.

Analysing Google Ngram Viewer:

British English

Analysing Google Ngram Viewer: American

English

Comparing English and American use

The uses were very similar except that bitch was
used more often in British English to describe
abstract items.
The form biatch did not appear in the British
English corpus on ngram viewer.
The use of the word bitch has peaked in the last
10 years in both British and American English.

Genres in which bitch appears

Highest frequency in the fictional register

In the magazine and spoken registers there is a higher frequency as well in contrast with
the newspaper and academic registers
Possible explanation in fictional register : informal style
The low frequency in the academic and newspaper registers is because these registers
use a more formal style and their aim is to transmit information or explain something.

Corpus of Historical American

English

The highest frequency appears in the year 2000

Other higher frequencies appear between the years 1960 and 1970.
Conclusion: the word bitch became to be a more used word from
1950 in spite of the slight differences across the 20 th century.

References
The Corpus Of Contemporary American English,
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Corpus of Historical American English,
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/
Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/
Sketch Engine, http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/

Thank you for watching!