Frequencies were measured as occurrences per million tokens (PMTok), calculated by decade. Variant spellings included in the count: asshole, ass-hole, ahole, a*hole, a$$hole, A.H., the A-word. Compound forms (e.g., asshole-adjacent) were excluded; quoted attestations within fiction were included.
| Decade | Google Books | COCA | Cumulative Index (1920=100) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920s | 0.4 | — | 100 |
| 1930s | 0.5 | — | 125 |
| 1940s | 0.7 | — | 175 |
| 1950s | 1.1 | — | 275 |
| 1960s | 2.4 | — | 600 |
| 1970s | 4.8 | — | 1,200 |
| 1980s | 7.1 | 5.8 | 1,775 |
| 1990s | 9.4 | 8.9 | 2,350 |
| 2000s | 11.2 | 10.7 | 2,800 |
| 2010s | 13.8 | 13.2 | 3,450 |
| 2020s (to 2024) | 15.1 | 14.9 | 3,775 |
An obvious confounder is the loosening of editorial conventions in published English between 1920 and 2024. We attempted to control for this by comparing the trajectory of asshole to that of three other markedly vulgar lexemes (damn, hell, bastard), which exhibit increases of 480%, 320%, and 290% respectively over the same period. Asshole’s increase is 7.7× the next-fastest. Editorial loosening cannot account for this gap; some additional factor is required.
We propose that the lexeme’s growth in frequency reflects a real growth in referents — not solely an increase in willingness to name them. This position is unfashionable. The present authors note that it is also the position implied by the data, and that the unfashionable is not, by itself, an argument.
The Google Books corpus is biased toward edited published prose and undersamples private correspondence, internet text, and oral speech — all of which the present authors expect to exhibit considerably higher frequencies than those reported here. The figure of 3,700% should therefore be regarded as a conservative lower bound. The true growth is, in our judgement, considerably larger; we have not attempted to quantify it.