expletive

An expletive is a word or phrase used to express strong emotion or to fulfill a syntactic requirement without adding substantive content. The term covers two broad uses: profanity—swear words deemed vulgar in a given culture—and grammatical expletives, such as dummy subjects that carry little or no lexical meaning.

Profanity expletives are highly context-dependent; their acceptability varies across communities, media, and formality. They can serve as emphasis, insult, or humor, and their usage is often regulated by social norms, censorship policies, and legal restrictions in some settings.

Grammatical expletives include words like there and it in constructions such as There is a problem or It seems surprising. These words carry little referential meaning and primarily satisfy syntactic or discourse functions, for example introducing a clause or protecting the real subject for stylistic reasons.

Etymology: The term expletive derives from Latin expletivus, from explere 'to fill up'; in English it has long described words placed into a sentence to fill space, express emotion, or fulfill grammatical requirements.

In linguistics and language technology, expletives are studied for syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sentiment analysis. In culture and media, their use is analyzed in terms of realism, character voice, and censorship. Expletives thus intersect social norms, language policy, and communicative effect.