I was eight and in the third grade.
The first word me and my friend looked up was whore. After that, it was all self-education.
Wait. I can’t believe I was the only one who did this. Man I the only reason I bugged my Moms to get me an unabridged college dictionary was so I could look up hardcore words.
My grandmother had this scrabble dictionary and I remember looking up the word “fuck” and being confused because it said it meant to copulate and I had no idea what that meant at the time.
I never looked up dirty words in the dictionary.
I did, however, look up “reproduction” in the big illustrated encyclopedia someone had given me. Man, what an education that was!
Maybe fourth or fifth grade, I don’t remember. I mean, I KNOW I did this, but I don’t remember any specifics.
When I was six, my cousin told me the word “fuck”. I went around saying it until I was finally heard and punished for it. I went to look it up in the dictionary (I was a damn good speller back then, and knew my way around a dictionary pretty well at that time). Anyway, I couldn’t find it in there, so I took the dictionary to my mother and told her I couldn’t find the word in there, and maybe she should look. She slammed the book shut and said it wasn’t* in * the dictionary. I was overjoyed. “Then it’s not a *real * word! Anyone can use it!”
I was grounded for months.
I started looking up words like “penis” and “regina” a couple years later. Man, “Regina” really confused me.
My friend Robyn and I were very curious about the word ‘rape’. We were seven years old when we looked it up in my parents’ dictionary. As I recall, the definition given was “unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman without her consent.” We looked up “carnal” and found that it concerned meat or flesh. So we were no less confused than when we started.
I was in the sixth grade and didn’t really know any “dirty” words. But I did try to look up the word meaning “containing unborn young within the body.” I had been so sheltered that even at the age of eleven, I did not know that the word pregnant had an r in it. I spelled and pronounced it peg-nant.
Me too! I was maybe ten. I don’t think it told me anything I hadn’t worked out already (mostly from reading my mother’s Redbook magazines), but to have it clearly explained, with no euphemisms or hinting around, did kind of confirm everything.
I think this is a joke in the play Arcadia.
That’s interesting! I haven’t read or seen the play. I wonder if Tom Stoppard looked up the word and had the same frustrating experience that my friend and I had.
I think I was about ten.
One of the first words I looked up was "circumcision’. Catholics celebrate the Feast of the circumcision on Jan. 1, but they manage to teach you that without actually explaining what “circumcision” means. They say that “it was when Christ was offered up to God”, which doesn’t actually help much (They manage to teach the commandments without explaining what “adultery” means, either. I’ll bet a lot of Catholics go into Advertising and Spin Control. )
In any event, I learned that Jews were circumcised, too. But they didn’t use that weord when they talked anout Baptism, which was supposed to be the Catholic ceremony of joining the religious community, so what was missing here?
The dicttionary definition told me that circumcision meant “the exscision of the foreskin”. That sent me looking for the definition of “foreskin”. That confused the hell out of me. Only haviing my own anatomy as a guide, I couldn’t figure out what was being lopped off – everything on the end of my boy parts seemed integral and essential, and cutting off any of it looked as serious as, say, cutting off a finger. Or a foot.
IOt wasn’t until years later, when I was trolling through a relative’s set of medical encyclopedias (That’s something guaranteed to turn you into a hypochondriac – but that’s another topic) that I came across a detailed description of the process of circumcision, complete with step-by-step drawings, that I realized that I had already been circumcixed. I couldn’t tell what a foreskin was because I already had it lopped off. The wave of understanding was followed by one of curiousity – why had they done this? It wasn’t until I came across a copy of “Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Sex” that I got that one answered.
the youngest of 4 kids, i was 5 when i got into my mother’s medical textbooks and learned about reproduction, with heavy assists from the dictionary. after i spent a few hours trying to wrap my head around this disgusting phenomenon, i went to my mother for some clarification. when i found out that, in essence, my understanding was correct, i looked at her with horror and said “i can’t believe you did that four times !”
yes, my mother loves to tell that story to all my friends, especially guys.
The first time I looked up dirty words in the dictionary I was in junior high. The new edition of the unabridged Random House Dictionary had just started including them and it was all over the news for a while. Shortly thereafter my mom and I were at the library and we saw that dictionary so I looked up fuck. I liked how clinical it was in describing derivative words: fucker, fucking, fucked, fuckface, etc.
–Cliffy
I pore over dictionaries for a living (well, at least till 5:00 today!), and I still giggle like a leedle girl when I flip past page 1361 of Webster’s 10th and see “wood pussy” on the upper-right corner.
I never looked up dirty words, either. It honestly never occured to me.
You can use “fuck” in Scrabble?
I can’t remember that far back. I’m guessing it was the week after I learned to read. 
I do remember in particular that I was in 4th grade when I went to see “Hair” and methodically looked up all the lyrics to Sodomy. Now that was an educational song.
You mean these? Climb aboard and take it out for a day!
I think I was 13 – I got a Funk and Wagnalls dictionary for my birthday and a friend suggested I look up “falsies.” I didn’t look for other words, since I didn’t expect them to be there. I actually can’t remember when I learned any of the standard dirty words.
I did sneak peaks in my parent’s Medical Dictionary, which had some intriguing drawings.
I was 6, and got busted for looking up “cunt” in my kiddy dictionary. My brother ratted me out.