Fuck comes from the early 16th cent.: of Germanic origin (compare Swedish dialect focka and
Dutch dialect fokkelen); possibly from an Indo-European root meaning strike, shared by Latin pugnus ‘fist.’
Despite the wideness and proliferation of its use in many sections of society, the word fuck remains (and has been for centuries) one of the most taboo words in
English. Until relatively recently, it rarely appeared in print; even today, there are a number of euphemistic ways of referring to it in speech and writing, e.g., the
F-word,
f***, or
f—k.