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Swedish profanity can be divided into several categories. A substantial number of curse words in Swedish have religious origins. Euphemistic variants of the religious curses are commonly used as well. References to genitalia or bodily functions are common in the Swedish profanity vocabulary. Notably, no word for sexual intercourse is commonly used in invectives, unlike many other languages. However, calques of English fuck using knull , knulla do occur; this comes across as more offensive than fuck does in English. In general, knull, along with genitalia slang words like kuk and fitta are the most offensive single words. By contrast, most of the traditional religious profanities are not considered very offensive today; this is in line with Sweden's long-standing secularism.
Some commonly used profanity is borrowed from other languages, such as English: Shit vad snygg hon är , German: Det var en scheissefilm , and Finnish: Perkele!. An overt attitude expressed regarding this phenomenon may be that some Swedish speakers find the native profanities lacking the required 'punch'; again this might be related to the perceived ineffectiveness of the traditional religious profanities; borrowing allows speakers to avoid the much more offensive native sexual vocabulary.
Other common English-origin profanities used are bitch and fuck. Such words are often rendered in a more-or-less diligent English pronunciation, suggesting code-switching, though more assimilated Swedish approximations, for shit, for fuck, are also common. More humorous is spelling pronunciation of fuck as , but the verb fucka upp, calqued on fuck up, and its participle uppfuckad, for fucked up, usually have the spelling pronunciation.
Commonly used as euphemisms are certain numerals, especially sjutton , and variant form tusan from tusen , plus nonsense numerals used as intensifiers like femtielva.