Taylor Swift Swears Her A** Off In Tortured Poet's Department (& Data Proves It)

One week after Taylor Swift released her April 2024 album "The Tortured Poets Department," the pop icon's 11th studio album broke several records, including most streams in a single day, most vinyl copies sold, and being the first album in Spotify history to reach a billion streams in less than a week. But it isn't just streams and sales records that Swift is setting — "TTPD" marks a new personal record for Swift as one of her most profane albums yet, according to our research. 

Swift was only 16 years old when she released her eponymous debut in October 2006, and she was nominated for her first Grammy Award for Best New Artist the following year. (She skipped her senior prom to attend the awards ceremony for the first time in 2008.) All that's to say, we've watched Swift grow up from an aspiring, wide-eyed, Nashvillian Americana singer-songwriter to a confident, self-assured, international pop icon. Unsurprisingly, her music reflects that. 

Indeed, Swift-the-musician's discography has grown up right alongside Swift, the cat-loving, baked-goods-making human. Part of that maturing involved moving away from her squeaky clean, FCC-approved lyricism to the grittier, explicit prose of "TTPD." The List conducted an exclusive study to analyze how profanity has evolved in Swift's music, and it turns out, she's acquired quite the sailor's mouth.

Although it can be easy to associate Taylor Swift with the bubbly, virtuous persona of her past teenage eras, the pop star was 34 years old when she released her 2024 album "The Tortured Poets Department." (By American cultural standards, she's well into adulthood and only one year too young to be qualified to run for president of the United States... but that's another fan dream for another time.) As a full-fledged adult, Swift is absolutely allowed to curse in her songs if she wants to. And if our study is any indication, she definitely wants to.

But first, what's a curse? We used Ofcom's official profanity guide to curate a list of 202 swear words of varying levels of offensiveness. Some curse words are FCC-compliant and can be played on the radio or television, like "damn," "hell," and "ass." Others are a bit more explicit, like "f***," "s***," and so on. Using this guide, we deduced what Swift's top-ten favorite curse words to include in her songs. 

Out of all the potential swears one might put into a song, Swift's favorites (in order of most to least used) include f***, s***, hell, damn, goddamn, b****, p***ed, w****, ass, and d***head. It's admittedly a little hard to imagine Swift saying any of these words on late 2010 albums like "Fearless" and "Speak Now." So, where do these curses come in?

Taylor Swift meticulously categorizes her albums into distinctive eras, and we followed suit with our study, starting with her self-titled debut from the late 2000s. "Taylor Swift" only had one relatively tame cuss word on the whole record: an FCC-friendly "damn." The singer's next two albums were even cleaner, featuring no profanity on either "Fearless" or "Speak Now." Swift's use of profanity steadily increased starting with her 2012 record "Red."

Swift's next two albums, "1989" (2014) and "Reputation" (2017), both had three curse words, a 200% increase from her debut. Her sun-soaked, pastel-vibe 2019 release "Lover" had four curse words. The pop star didn't break double digits in profanity until 2020 with the release of "folklore," which had ten curses, making it 150% more profanity-filled than her previous record and 900% more profane than her debut. She nearly doubled her explicit content with the sister album to "folklore," "evermore," which included 19 curse words across the tracklist.

Unsurprisingly, her two most explicit albums are her most recent as of 2024. "Midnights," released on October 21, 2022, features 31 curse words, marking a 63% increase from "evermore." But "The Tortured Poets Department" easily bests all of her previous records in terms of profanity, coming in at 57 curse words and marking a whopping 5600% increase in explicitness since her freshman release.

A 5600% increase in profanity is a huge number, so let's put it into context. While it's true that Taylor Swift has steadily used more and more curse words in her albums, these profanities are dispersed across an entire tracklist. Some tracks might include one explicit word for emphasis, while others will feature the curses more regularly. To better understand how Swift includes profanity in her discography, let's zoom in a little closer at her overall song list.

Our data shows Swift's most explicit songs are on "Tortured Poets Department," which statistically makes sense. "Down Bad" includes 18 f-bombs, making it Swift's most profane song yet with a ratio of just under 4% explicitness. "Florida," another "TTPD" banger, comes in as Swift's second-most profane song with 12 curse words. "Lavender Haze" is shortly behind "Florida" with ten curse words — interestingly, the ratio of profanity in "Lavender" is greater than in "Florida" because of the overall word count. Swift's "Midnights" track comes in at 3.2% profanity, while Swift's "TTPD" collaboration with Florence Welch is only 2.8% explicit.

Other notable mentions include "ivy," "Karma," "Maroon," "'tis the damn season," "Vigilante S***," "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart," and "Question...?" In most of these tracks, Swift uses various combinations of multiple curse words. "Down Bad" and "'tis the damn season" are the only highly explicit Swift tracks that use a single curse word repeatedly throughout the song.

The List's exclusive Taylor Swift profanity study spans 18 years, 11 studio albums, countless set records, a laundry list of Grammys and other accolades, and just as many different aesthetics and style phases. To crunch the numbers and determine Swift's most profane musical contributions of all time, we used multiple resources, including Ofcom's comprehensive curse word list, Swift lyrics we pulled from Genius.com, and some good, old-fashioned mathematics.

For the sake of simplicity, we grouped similar swear words, like "damn" and "damned," together. Next, we pored over every word Swift has ever written (there are 65,019 of them, by the way) and picked out all the profanities. We recorded the specific curse words she used and the number of times she sang them in a song. For extra measure, we determined the ratio of explicitness by dividing the number of explicit words by the overall word count. Then, we added up each album's total number of curses across the entire track list, which allowed us to determine a percentage increase in profanities in Swift's discography over the years.

All in all, the data speaks for itself. Swift has gotten more explicit as her music career has progressed, which is to be expected from someone who started releasing music when they were still a teenager. The pop icon has not only grown more comfortable using profanity in her music — she's also gotten pretty damn good at it.