Word Of The Issue: What The Fokk Are You Looking At?

The Grapevine’s Guide To Sounding Icelandic, One Word At A Time

Unless you don’t go outside, you will hear tons of Icelanders generously using the word fokk.

Icelanders, especially younger ones, are keen on using this at times that English speakers would use the word “fuck”. Because who doesn’t love a good F-bomb when they drop something, are running late to work or accidentally hurt themselves?

However, what a lot of people don’t know is that fokk is not an English loan word — it’s a homegrown Icelandic word.

Before I proceed, it’s important to point out that fokk used the way described earlier does indeed seem to come from English. Other swears used in Icelandic — like andskotinn or djöfullinn — don’t have readily apparent English roots. That being said, fokk can also mean something along the lines of “mess” or “disarray” or even “poorly done work.”

For example, one might say: Ég fór til læknis af því að allt var í fokki. (I went to the doctor because everything was messed up).

One could argue that this isn’t even that far off from English, as one could say “I went to the doctor because everything was fucked up,” but the use of “fuck” as a noun in and of itself isn’t a thing. You would see this more in conjunction with certain prefixes or suffixes such as “cluster-” (clusterfuck) or “-up” (fuckup). In Icelandic, fokk is more of a state of being.

With all that said, I hope that you found this to be fokking helpful in terms of getting your Icelandic out of fokki.