The first known grawlix appeared in November 1, 1901 story of
Gene Carr's
comic stripLady Bountiful, with the title
"Lady Bountiful is Shocked", and continued to expand its usage throughout 1902 and 1903.[4] In December 12, 1902, The Katzenjammer Kids became the second comic to adapt grawlixes, among many other comic trends seen today.[4]
In 1964, American cartoonist
Mort Walker popularized[a] the term "grawlix" in his article Let's Get Down to Grawlixes,[1][4] which he expanded upon in his book The Lexicon of Comicana.[4]
The
emojiU+1F92C🤬SERIOUS FACE WITH SYMBOLS COVERING MOUTH represents a face with grawlixes over the mouth. It was proposed in 2016[6] and accepted into
Unicode 10.0 in 2017.
In November 2022,
Merriam-Webster and
Hasbro added the word to the seventh edition of The Official
Scrabble Players Dictionary, citing familiarity among younger players.[7]
Etymology
A
Merriam-Webster blog post suggests the word grawlix may have originated from the word growl, which is a sound a person makes when they are angry.[3]
Example
"Come this fall,
CBS will debut a 7:30 p.m. sitcom starring 79-year-old
William Shatner. The title is
$#*! My Dad Says. The opening profanity symbols (called grawlixes) will be pronounced "bleep," but we all know what it stands for." — Michael Storey, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 20, 2010
Notes
^Although Walker is often credited with having created this terminology, in 2013, comics scholar
Maggie Thompson discovered that Walker was using terms invented by Charles D. Rice, in an article published in This Week and subsequently reprinted in What's Funny About That (1954). Thompson also observed that, although Walker credited these symbols to "Charlie Rice of This Week magazine" in his book Backstage at the Strips (1975), "many of us [including Thompson herself] had assumed [that this] was Mort's joke about an imaginary scholarly attribution".[5]