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WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

431 points by randall 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
It's great :-) However, could I Suggest there are two markets for this and you might be falling between two stools. Firstly there is the market we have here - looking for dirty words in different languages. I love the petites bites ad - and it would be great to have a crowd sourced "daily WTF" site of amusing failures But the usage of your site looks ... Serious, with half an eye maybe on charging marketing departments for access. Which is almost impossible because no sane database can catch MR2. But if the entertainment site catches on, you have a ready made list of reliable dirty-minded experts whose private opinions and double entendres you can charge marketing depts to put their ideas in front of them - confidentially ensuring they don't screw up. And given that the number of language to language potential screwups is n^^2 and the experts are n you should be ok. Anyway - it's a lovely idea and reminds me of Douglas Adams' "Go stick your head in a pig".
eterm 11y ago
There needs to be a "No results found" type result. Currently it's impossible to tell the difference between no result and an empty result.
cwkoss 11y ago
Anyone find any real-world matches? I was able to get positives by typing in foreign curses directly, but couldn't find any startups with foreign curses in their name.
- lclemente 11y ago
  "airbnb" results in “ayr” Arabic: penis The only one I could find, so just bad luck :)
- elros 11y ago
  Not a startup, but yesterday I was impressed with the font Skolar, which name I mistakenly remembered as Skola, and apparently it's considered close enough to "Chola", which is Hindi for clitoris. The "level of worriness" does go down (pun intended) when I type the font's correct name.
- eterm 11y ago
  Wikipedia was the closest I found, not really a start up though.
maartenscholl 11y ago
I think this should also do a phoneme based comparison, for example the photo sharing website Flickr is pronounced like this word (as a slang word it is well known) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flikker https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flikker
- sovok 11y ago
  Or wix.com, which sounds like wichs in German (wank).
  - pluma 11y ago
    The amazing thing about wix.com is that they went all-out with their marketing in Germany and embraced the phonetic similarity. I'm not sure what audience they're aiming for by having the ads consist of people explaining that (and how) they wank -- with the obvious "twist ending" where they make it clear they're referring to using their product rather than masturbating. But I guess anyone turned off their product by the "racy" ads likely would have avoided it because of the name in the first place.
- ludamad 11y ago
  Do you know of any high-quality phonemic dictionaries?
  - schoen 11y ago
    There is such a thing for English, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Very, very useful, although specific to American English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Pronouncing_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Pronouncing_Dictionary I've succeeding in using it to solve puzzles that had to do with how words were pronounced, as opposed to how they were spelled.
serverholic 11y ago
FYI this doesn't check for words that sound like swear words. For example, it'll detect Fuck but not Fack.
- eterm 11y ago
  With the input box I suspect they want the database to be crowdsourced. I wonder if they vet the input, if we all try hard enough might we get hackernews into the swear list?
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Is a start. How about death and failure type words? Muerta doesn't elicit any warning. And 'Nova' is famous for its Spanish meaning (apocryphal?) - words like that might be hard to catch.
davidw 11y ago
Italian one needs work. It did not have 'minchia' in it, which is no longer even all that regional, AFAIK. Didn't have 'mona' either, although that could be foregiven as it's dialect in the Veneto.
- ragazzina 11y ago
  italian is definitely lacking. it doesn't recognize STOCATSO nor ESTIGRANQATSI nor euphemisms such as patata, passera..
anEasternGoat 11y ago
poo is all good.
PaulHoule 11y ago
The phonetic matching doesn't catch "Phuck"
lvh 11y ago
Excellent idea, but the lists need to be expanded. Didn't catch any of the Slavic words I threw its way.
mcorrand 11y ago
"bite" is safe according to this tool. Any french speaker does a double take when they see that word though, especially in certain sentences. For reference: https://askafrenchguy.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/petite-bites-pauvre-nancy/ https://askafrenchguy.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/petite-bites-... Edit: Yes, I have submitted it to the database, it should get vetted eventually. A crowdsourced process for the vetting could be fun too!
- backtoyoujim 11y ago
  much less "bitenuker" which is highly offensive to those who speak either French or Dutch.
  - rgj 11y ago
    I'm Dutch and I know my offensive language. Never heard of that.
    - protonfish 11y ago
      It's a joke from 30 Rock.
    - ruraljuror 11y ago
      A Franco-Dutchman would pronounce it bete-neuker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqszqbd5cLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqszqbd5cLg
- baby 11y ago
  "pipi" as well http://i.imgur.com/VcSKnTb.png http://i.imgur.com/VcSKnTb.png
  - flurpitude 11y ago
    "zizi" too.
    - r0naa 11y ago
limaoscarjuliet 11y ago
Do not trust yet - list is not complete. Some known Polish bad words are not there.
- aluhut 11y ago
  Phonetic does not work also. Tried qrwa, qurwa, kuhrwa,. Nothing. They also find hui (russian) but not huj or chuj.
  - yetihehe 11y ago
    Yeah, I've had some fine time trying to remember most of polish swear words. But it will probably never properly take into account the variety of word "pierdolić".
deleted 11y ago
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- Rockdtben 11y ago
  There is a form to submit words that are missing.
elros 11y ago
I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Things like, the nonexistent English word "bocket" sounding like Brazilian slang for blowjob ("boquete"), but only when spoken the way a Brazilian would. I think this cross-pronouncing thing would actually be harder to tackle: It's more important to try to match the way users on their home locale would say the foreign term, than the way the foreign people would say it. To illustrate what I mean, consider the word Skype, said in Portuguese, is pronounced as if it were spelt in English as "Shkuipy" (I mean [ʃkaj'pi]).
- pavlov 11y ago
  I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Honestly, the code for that sucks. It just looks for specific variations of letter combinations. I guess a more robust approach would try to build up a real phonetic representation of the word, then apply various languages' orthographic rules to that to check for matches.
  - timpark 11y ago
    I'm no expert on phonetic matching, but a product I worked on many years ago used Soundex. (It's meant for English pronunciation, so you'd have to research other languages) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
    - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
      Soundex is optimized for collapsing the spelling of names into a common key and isn't so hot for general words. Metaphone would be a more useful matching algorithm. It also preserves a legible spelling so that you can pass the result onto further fuzzy matching stages like an edit distance measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone
- toufka 11y ago
  It doesn't do phonetic matching. A big flaw. Baca returns nothing, Baka returns 'idiot/er in Japanese'.
tucif 11y ago
It would be nice this detected double meaning phrases, although it might be hard to implement. In spanish many combinations of 'safe' words will generate very 'unsafe' meanings, probably many other languages too.
maartenscholl 11y ago
"expertsexchange" only matches the Chinese “cha”, and not "sex" or "sexchange".
- sanbor 11y ago
  That reminds me to the name "KIDSEXCHANGE". [Picture of the store](http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/blog/blog-images/kidsexchange-weird-name.jpg http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/blog/blog-images/kidsexcha...).
- vitd 11y ago
  Yeah, it seems like it either doesn't match english words (probably because it assumes you already speak English since it's an English-language web site), or it is only looking for specific types of matches (swear words, etc.). I tried merder.com, since I know that "merde" is french for "shit" and it sounds like "murder.com". It caught "merde", but didn't catch "murder". I then tried "murder.com" and it was like, "Yep! Looks good! Go for it!" (I may be paraphrasing.)
- tomkwok 11y ago
  Coincidentally cha1 ("1" here means the first tone in pinyin) is a sexual innuendo alluding to sexual intercourse. The character itself, which means "to insert", has nothing to do with sex in normal usage though. And most importantly, there is virtually zero resemblance between the pronunciation of "change" and that of "cha1". > to have sex (lit. insert). > Source: a long list of Chinese profanity on Wikipedia.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese_profanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese_profanity
pavlov 11y ago
Hey guys, I made this last week as a two-evening side project. Happy to see it posted here, thanks randall! I know the word lists aren't complete. This was the best I could do given the time constraint, the fact that I don't actually speak 19 languages... And also, after two evenings of googling dirty words, I started feeling like I'm about to acquire Tourette's in some unknown language ;) I'll update the database with the words submitted here and through the form on the site. Thanks! -- Edit -- here's Google Analytics for this site after 1 hour on the HN frontpage: http://wordsafety.com/img/analytics_2015-08-25_1736.jpg http://wordsafety.com/img/analytics_2015-08-25_1736.jpg This is a site that had essentially zero traffic before HN, so I figured this would be a potentially interesting glimpse into HN's audience.
- aladdinw 11y ago
  I will be happy to help with arabic words
  - pavlov 11y ago
    Don't hesitate to submit on the site, it's very welcome! (I'm going to vet them manually when I have a moment.)
    - yetihehe 11y ago
      I've seen some words with bad meanings, like "cipa" means "polish: penis" according to your site, but it actually means "vagina" (quite the opposite ;) ). Is it good if I just submit better meanings ?
- azeirah 11y ago
  I'm so proud of you <3 http://i.imgur.com/bMQK9vU.png http://i.imgur.com/bMQK9vU.png
  - pavlov 11y ago
    Indeed your reply was the reason I made this, so thanks :)
tptacek 11y ago
Misses "matasano" -> "quack doctor".
gfrench27 11y ago
like a construction company responsible for erections, perhaps?
deleted 11y ago
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osipov 11y ago
It fails on the classic Nova check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urban_legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urba...
- pavlov 11y ago
  It would be really hard to capture this kind of double meaning that only applies to a certain product category... "Doesn't go" is certainly an unwanted association for a car, but it wouldn't matter for most products. To make it more complicated, "nova" actually has the same astronomical meaning in Spanish as in English: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova So it's fine in some contexts, bad in some very specific context. Someone smarter than me will probably crack problems like this with AI...
- xd1936 11y ago
  Yup. http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png
- kissickas 11y ago
  Did you read that link? > This has since been debunked. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
cmenge 11y ago
It wouldn't have saved Mitsubishi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero But I like the idea and will submit a few words
bbrazil 11y ago
Doesn't catch "tineh", which is apparently a derogatory term for Indians http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tineh http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tineh, so probably wise to also check UD and Google. I was going to have that as part of my company name until I discovered that (tineh is a transliteration of the word for "fire" in Irish).
DarkContinent 11y ago
I tried Tessa and it means "to pee." How come it is not on the list? I know it's not a swear word, but it's still a name with negative connotations.
- Rockdtben 11y ago
  There is a form to submit words that are missing.
JJN 11y ago
Wang. No results found! Kimmy. No results found! Interesting.
- Rockdtben 11y ago
  There is a form to submit words that are missing.
werber 11y ago
This is really a shame, I would hate to see unintentionally awful things in corporate media go away!
xd1936 11y ago
Solid. http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png
- dandrino 11y ago
  For those who don't get the reference, there is an urban legend that the Chevy Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because "no va" translates to "no go".
akie 11y ago
It literally fails on the first word I tried, the/a Dutch word for 'penis': http://imgur.com/Mw6Efx0 http://imgur.com/Mw6Efx0
sanbor 11y ago
Tried the Spanish word "pajero" (usually translated to "wanker" or "tosser"). Mitsubishi named a car "Pajero" and they had to change the name to "Montero" in Spanish speaking countries. Another unfortunate car name is Suzuki Moco. This word neither appears in this app. "Moco" means "snot" or "booger" in Spanish.
- cossatot 11y ago
  I have found it's important when emailing/texting in Spanish to put the tilde in 'año', when I normally wouldn't bother with an American keyboard.
  - ghurtado 11y ago
    US-Based native Spanish speaker here. Very important indeed, specially when asking someone their age :) Whenever the ñ is not available (foreign keyboards, mobile, etc...), a decent substitute is "anyo", which is phonetically equivalent and also happens to be the Ladino variant of the word.
    - pvaldes 11y ago
      Agno is safer (same idea as in 'gnu'). "Anyo" is close phonetically to "anillo", that is a ring, but also a common source of jokes about little Frodo's sexuallity.
      - notNow 11y ago
        I think Catalan people don't have the "ñ" letter in their alphabet and they use instead this combination "ny" for that particular sound.
        pvaldes 11y ago
        Well, catalan people have the ñ letter in their alphabet because they are spaniards, is just that some of them prefer to ignore this for political reasons, and they choose instead to do simple things complicated. Both systems are a question of convenience, so no one is perfect. You can choose between the useful (and trendy in two or three spanish communities) "ny" or the older "gn" charged of historical context and showing lots of connections with other latin languages like french. Be aware also that "ny" leads easily to a "nll" sound that can be annoying, specially when is placed next to an 'i'. This is just a personal opinion. Is perfecty ok if you think different, but if you are interested in mastering the second language with more native speakers in the world, I'll suggest to avoid the political experiments of the modern catalan and save yourself a lot of future headaches with grammar and orthography. To replace the 'ñ' by '~n' will work in most of the cases also.
iskander 11y ago
Missed a few of the ones I tried: "zina" "eir" "khuee" "popa"
nutjob123 11y ago
Results for “home” “ho” English: woman Direct match at start or end, potentially serious issue! 335 million native speakers, about 1.5 billion speakers in total.
tegansnyder 11y ago
There might be a good service in this as an API.
raverbashing 11y ago
Maybe it should include English words as well? Beaver returns nothing 'caca' and 'pede' do return, so props for that 'bosta' matches but maybe Josta should? 'sharmuta' also matches (with a different spelling, but it's probably a variation)
- pimlottc 11y ago
  Yes, it seems to be missing a fair bit of English slang, like "fanny", "root", "gigolo"...
seany 11y ago
This falls into they "why bother" class of things for me. You're never going to catch `everything`, and this stuff almost always causes very broken edge cases for people. I can't use my real last name at the apple genius bar last I checked because it's "offensive"...
schoen 11y ago
This seems like a nice idea, but many of the comments here are pointing to omissions that the people commenting feel could be serious. I guess I see six kinds of potential difficulties: ① There are so many languages out there, including languages will millions of speakers who might eventually come across your thing. Maybe that's not an issue for tangible products that will be marketed to specific territories. ② There are so many slang terms out there; each individual language might well have thousands of terms that have a rude, sexual, or excretory meaning, or that are used as a slur against some group. Also, some languages have expletives that don't correspond to expletives in other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity ③ People have pointed out that phonetic matching is hard when you're dealing with different languages' orthographies and phonologies, and you can have the problem of "the source language's intended pronunciation sounds like an offensive word in the other language", "the other language's likely pronunciation of the written term sounds like an offensive word in the other language", or even other combinations among highly multilingual populations. "Sounds like" is sometimes challenging to automate in software, for example because epenthesis of a vowel may not be enough to remove the association. (But I think Levenshtein edit distance between phonemic transcriptions can kind of sort of work.) Also, the "MR2" example someone gave shows that understanding how people will pronounce something in different languages is complicated: you have to know that the number two in French is "deux" /dø/. ④ People might also perceive something as an offensive reference that isn't even familiar to people elsewhere, like a reference to an upsetting person, place, or event. Reportedly some people in India have named people and businesses after Adolf Hitler just because he was famous, for example. I bet it's easy to do this cross-culturally in general. ⑤ As people point out with the Chevy Nova story, there might be a reason why a product name would become the target of ridicule in a particular language even if it's not offensive. That's true even if it didn't literally happen to the Chevy Nova. ⑥ It might even turn out that the space of offensive references is so dense that there is nothing that isn't a near-homophone of something pretty offensive in some language. Anyway, I think this project is really neat; I'm just reminded from people's comments that natural language is hard! There's scope to keep expanding this site, and I think there are also existing "cultural consultant" businesses that try to deal with these problems through human review (I wonder how many of them have consultants on contract from many widely varying cultures, which seems especially useful in the Internet era).
magic_beans 11y ago
"Bite"... means "dick" in french...
orf 11y ago
Interesting, I recently found out that one of my usernames on a popular game means "shitman" in finnish or swedish, not through this site though (and it doesn't appear to bring anything up). Great idea though! Also the word search field has an XSS, try entering "<script>alert(1)</script>". Not sure if it's a big deal but it's good to be safe.
arihant 11y ago
So this seems to work for a very small subset of the words I typed. Also, it seems to only check against dictionary meaning and not cultural usage. "Tatsu" means "to stand" in Japanese, but is culturally used for erection. This is just an example, I tried a bunch which I know and none were flagged.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  I think this is a case of 'the product is YOU!' notice the little box 'enter word here'? :P
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    That box doesn't seem to permit adding cultural referents / context. If we added all normal words that can have another meaning, it'd flag almost everything.
- _0nac 11y ago
  "Tatsu" is the verb stem and would not be offensive alone; in fact, like most Japanese words, it has plenty of homonyms including 竜, "dragon". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A4#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A4#Japanese Flagging that would be kind of like flagging "hard" in English. Could it potentially be offensive in the wrong context? Yes. Are there brands where that would be absolutely fine? Yes.
hokkos 11y ago
Doesn't work in French : caca, bite
scoopr 11y ago
Ah good, it matches ‘perse’, which was a slight amusement when seeing the expensive clothing brand ‘James Perse’ while visiting the US :)
deleted 11y ago
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hougaard 11y ago
Missing danish ! There are some really good curse words in danish :)
Someone 11y ago
"Results for “Hello” “hell” English: heck Direct match at start or end, potentially serious issue! 335 million native speakers, about 1.5 billion speakers in total." Isn't that overdoing it a little?
- Retra 11y ago
  False positives are far more useful than false negatives.
dradtke 11y ago
It didn't catch anything on "phuck," despite claiming that it checks phonetically. Still a nice idea, though.
berbatof 11y ago
Aren't you the creator of Pixel Conduit? I used your tool for some VFX works and recently saw that you are creating software for web animations, but it ia a surprise to see you come up with such a tool. By the way, I am planning to create a slang database for Turkish and Turkic languages. I would like to share the database with you as I develop.
petercooper 11y ago
I've submitted it but it brought up nothing for "wog". Did this due to the "wogrammer"/"wog" issue pointed out on Twitter yesterday. I haven't heard it in recent years but "wog" was used much like the n-word when I was a kid in the UK and appears to still carry some of that meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog "slope" is another, but I don't know if I'll submit it since no-one seemed to have heard of it at the time. Jeremy Clarkson got in trouble over it though - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/top-gear/10995483/Jeremy-Clarksons-slope-joke-on-Top-Gear-was-deliberate-use-of-racist-term-Ofcom-rules.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/top-gear/10995483/Jeremy... I absolutely love the idea of having a newsletter on the backend full of awful words submitted though - a rather "cute" idea.
mrbig4545 11y ago
It says "pute" is fine, but google translate says otherwise… edit: I submitted it
ecesena 11y ago
Suggestion for improvement: numbers. I was about to name a project "Plate88", and a couple of people independently pointed out a reference to the nazi salute [1]. We then renamed it to Plate28, hopefully safer. Anyway, maybe worth considering these use cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)
- protomyth 11y ago
  Which brings us to the second part of naming things. I wouldn't tell someone in NASCAR country that 88 means a nazi salute unless you really want to offend.
  - ecesena 11y ago
    Exactly -- we want to do a healthy/educational thing, imagine our surprise knowing that...
    - protomyth 11y ago
      I guess I would say the bad meaning of 88 is not very relevant and certainly shouldn't stop a company operating in Asia from using it. Heck, a golf company using 88 would mean double snowmen rather than any dark meaning beyond a bad score.
- DavidAdams 11y ago
  When my son was about 5, he picked up on the fact that the number 88 sounds a lot like "idiot," so he got a lot of pleasure out of yelling "88" all the time. It's become part of our family folklore. I take a lot of pleasure associating white nationalism with the word idiot now.
olympus 11y ago
I saw this and immediately thought of an old story where General Motors tried to sell the Chevy Nova in South America. It hardly sold at all in South America even though it was a hugely popular car in North America. The reason turned out to be that "No va" in Spanish translates to "won't go" so GM was basically trying to sell a sporty car with a misleading name. Unfortunately this website wouldn't have helped GM sell the Nova since it's only looking for profanity, but I think that the concept is great and clearly needed. I hope you develop it further and get to make some money off of it. Great job!
- nerevarthelame 11y ago
  For what it's worth, the "Nova" story is a myth: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
  - rmetzler 11y ago
    Here is a whole list of cultural misunderstandings of car manufacturers http://www.oddee.com/item_93544.aspx http://www.oddee.com/item_93544.aspx
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - jjxw 11y ago
    That was the first thing I attempted to search for and the output from the site is: Spanish: did you know that the popular anecdote about the Chevrolet Nova is an urban legend? Google for "snopes nova". It's a nice detail.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- notNow 11y ago
  But I guess it sold like hot cakes in Brazil, didn't it?
linkydinkandyou 11y ago
It knows Russian (good!) but not Hebrew.
jstoiko 11y ago
Just tried the word "crotte" which means "dung" in french. It returned "No results found for this search. It looks likely that it's safe." Phew, it's a good thing I speak french :)
briholt 11y ago
It doesn't have "pinche" which is about the most common Mexican curse word.
hiraki9 11y ago
Similar app for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/profanity-check/id923020053 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/profanity-check/id923020053 Blog post: http://blog.lexiconbranding.com/2015/05/12/our-first-iphone-app-profanity-check/ http://blog.lexiconbranding.com/2015/05/12/our-first-iphone-...
BasDirks 11y ago
submitted a bunch in Dutch.
paulsutter 11y ago
Excellent idea. Given the number of people here who missed the "add a word" function, you might want to mention it up top with a negative result. > No results found for this search. It looks likely that it's safe... say this in hopes to get fuller coverage because it looks like a useful tool.
- pavlov 11y ago
  I updated the "no results" text, thanks!
alanh 11y ago
> We respect your privacy — input is never logged or monitored. Except it is logged and monitored by the US Government because this site uses unencrypted HTTP. Otherwise, a commendable sentiment…
RomanPushkin 11y ago
pajero is not safe
- marianov 11y ago
  Was the first thing I tried being from Argentina. Big fail.
ivankirigin 11y ago
I searched "gift" expecting "poison" from German, and was disappointed when nothing came up.
GhotiFish 11y ago
Where was this when these guys were picking their name? http://pidora.ca/ http://pidora.ca/
- vaskas 11y ago
  155 million native speakers.
sterl 11y ago
Missing Zune which means Penis in Quebec.
Aardwolf 11y ago
Doesn't support even the most dirty Dutch words! Could use more languages :)
randunel 11y ago
It doesn't match some balkanic or eastern european words. Some of us don't appreciate tracking links, please get rid of tracking so we don't have to manually edit the urls.
BasDirks 11y ago
Dutch: http://www.taalkabaal.nl/scheldwoorden/indexa.php http://www.taalkabaal.nl/scheldwoorden/indexa.php Have fun. Some of these are spelled incorrectly, so run them through a spell-checker. While I'm at it, let me translate some personal favourites. I realize they are quite long and unlikely candidates for the next hot SF start-up, but why keep knowledge away from the masses: adderengebroedsels - offspring of vipers argeologisch kontfossiel - archaeological ass fossil bosuil - Strix aluco duinbewoner - dune dweller ebverzuiper - person who drowns during ebb (burnnn) greppelheks - ditch witch ingeblikte atlas - canned atlas (??) janksnor - literally "crying mustache" kamelenzuurvleesoog - literally "camels-Sauerbraten-eye" (???) mountendeldarmbeklimmer -- literally "climber of Mt. rectum" paashaasschaamhaarverzamelaar -- literally "collector of Easter Bunny pubes" rioolpinguin -- sewer pinguin tepelbaviaan -- nipple baboon I have submitted several short and useful Dutch words to grant myself license for this comment.
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  I want to start a razor startup now just so I can call it Janksnor.
  - devbug 11y ago
    Dollar Shave Club... but for Scandinavia. Or a brutally fast Handlebars implementation.
- nice_byte 11y ago
  > kontfossiel LMAO :')
- digi_owl 11y ago
  > bosuil - Strix aluco Huh?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- magic_beans 11y ago
gernig 11y ago
Searched for Imen, nothing. Lousy program
- randall 11y ago
  Fix it then! Contribute. This is a 2 day program. Help him out!
odabaxok 11y ago
I believe you can make a good use of http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ to update your database, because there are also lot of foreign words, which you miss at the moment. (pula - Romanian for dick, fasz - Hungarian for dick, piča - Czech/Slovak for cunt, etc.)
- anonfunction 11y ago
  They have an unofficial API[1] that could be used. [1] http://api.urbandictionary.com/v0/define?term=culo http://api.urbandictionary.com/v0/define?term=culo
pvaldes 11y ago
One of the funniest in Spain: facultad (faculty). An innocent word, with a very common and poisoned abbreviature. "Nos vamos a la fac" (We go to the university). English speakers always hear another thing. Totally homophone with the called "f-word"
paulnechifor 11y ago
While you have this on the front page, why not start a repo where people can send pull requests, rather than submit one word at a time?
personlurking 11y ago
Pretty cool. And the example I chose, funny. I searched "foda" (f--- in Brazil) just to try it out, here's the result, which actually mentions the Amazon. http://i.imgur.com/CUpSgN6.png http://i.imgur.com/CUpSgN6.png
- schoen 11y ago
  You don't have to go very deep into the Amazon at all for that to be an insult. :-) What an amusing example.
normloman 11y ago
This doesn't work for Esperanto. Fiku vin!
rramdin 11y ago
I've been blessed to name my new startup "Phucker."
- probinso 11y ago
  "phuck" works as well
maxhou 11y ago
I'd have expected a small easteregg for the word "bro" ;)
orjan 11y ago
"He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that checked if the made-up word meant "dickhead" or something in Chinese or Swedish." -- William Gibson, "Mona Lisa Overdrive" https://books.google.se/books?id=QojrNYyGMyEC&pg=PA118#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.se/books?id=QojrNYyGMyEC&pg=PA118#v=one...
zobzu 11y ago
tried a few common insults in my native tongue (french) and it detected none...
sandworm101 11y ago
It's missing rather a big one. "Mist" means something very different in german. My point: Is this connected to dictionaries or is it all crowdsourced data?
- personlurking 11y ago
  Isn't 'mist' like 'darn' in English?
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Mist.html http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Mist.html Mist {m} [ugs.] crap [vulg.] rubbish [esp. Br.] [nonsense] bullshit <BS> [vulg.] tripe [coll.] garbage [fig.] bull [derived from bullshit] [Am.] [vulg.]
  - pluma 11y ago
    "Darn" is a minced oath. Mist, simply means "crap" or "manure". A pile of manure is called "Misthaufen" (crap heap), a pitchfork for handling manure is called "Mistforke" or "Mistgabel" (crap fork). It's a bit vulgar but so is the subject matter. But you can also use it as a general expression of discontent: "Mist!" is something you might exclaim if you just dropped something expensive and fragile. It's still vulgar but it's something you'd find far more appropriate around the young ones than the harsher "Scheiße!" (shit). It's basically the little brother of "shit" in the same way as "dumb" is the little brother of "retarded". You might legitimately hear someone curse at the "Mistkatze" (Katze = cat) that just peed on the bed, or the "Mistauto" (Auto = car) that refuses to start or simply shout "So ein Mist!" when they find out they've spent the past hour aligning the wallpaper upside down. The equivalent of "damn" would be "verdammt" and there are minced oaths for that in German as well (although nowadays they're generally considered cute and not something you'd use only because you're mild-mannered or religious).
    - sandworm101 11y ago
      Man, don't put "dumb" anywhere near "retarded". I don't want another literal user for a word (retarded=delayed, dumb=mute) to disappear in the name of political correctness. To quote from TGOTG: "This dumb tree, he is my friend." Groot is dumb because his is effectively a mute. Drax was not commenting in any way on his intelligence.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
donatj 11y ago
> Results for “boomerang” > “bum” > English: butt > Direct match at start or end, potentially serious issue! lol.
fabiofzero 11y ago
Found a hole on my first try. 'Foda' in Portuguese is 'fuck', yet the app deemed it to be safe. 'Foda-se' (fuck you) wasn't there either - submitted both.
mojobot 11y ago
False positive: "hat" was flagged for "idiot" in English. I can't find a dictionary with that definition, and it's not one that I'm familiar with as a native speaker.
temuze 11y ago
This is great! There are certain puns/combos that would be really hard to catch though. For example - the Ford Nova. In Spanish, it literally translates to "no va" "doesn't go". Terrible name for a car. I'm unsure how to make this understand the context of the product, but that would be the next step
- unholiness 11y ago
  "Colgate" similarly passed. In Spanish, it's the imperative command "Hang yourself".
- notNow 11y ago
  But "nova" in Portuguese means "new" so I guess Ford was in the safe side with that product name.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nvader 11y ago
  I've always been pretty skeptical about Nova in particular. It's like an English speaker going to a restaurant named "Notable": we wouldn't expect to have to eat on the floor.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Not really: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
joshmn 11y ago
I use a similar method to find brandable names and domain names. I'll input a word or synonym of into Google Lang Tools and translate it into all the available languages. I've had really good success in doing so.
return0 11y ago
Doesnt detect any greek curse words
tomsmeding 11y ago
It seems that "fuk" is not recognised as sounding like "fuck". Might want to look at that phonetic matcher :)
- edeion 11y ago
  While it could help some people around to know about it: http://www.tripadvisor.fr/Restaurant_Review-g298113-d4906941-Reviews-Fukyu_an-Takayama_Gifu_Prefecture_Chubu.html http://www.tripadvisor.fr/Restaurant_Review-g298113-d4906941...
tsotha 11y ago
If only Miyazaki would have had this when he named Laputa: Castle in the sky
- jcl 11y ago
  FWIW, he got the name from Jonathan Swift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa
  - tsotha 11y ago
    Who... apparently didn't speak Spanish.
    - desdiv 11y ago
      >As "la puta" means "the whore" (see Spanish profanity), some Spanish editions of "Gulliver's Travels" use "Lapuntu", "Laput", "Lapuda" and "Lupata" as bowdlerisations. It is likely, given Swift's brand of satire, that he was aware of the Spanish meaning. (Gulliver, himself, claimed Spanish among the many languages in which he was fluent.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa
glibgil 11y ago
"cu" gets a pass. https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/cu https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/cu
konne88 11y ago
I would have expected "Coq" to fail.
- kruipen 11y ago
  Only if it could be formally proved wrong...
- xigency 11y ago
  I would have expected Cox Communications to fail.
ajonit 11y ago
You seem to have a good grip on Hindi words :) This is a good idea. Last I heard, Accenture spent good amount of $$$ to verify the name in several languages before fixing on that name!
babuskov 11y ago
Is Russian really supported? I tried both Cyrillic and Latin transliteration of some words and it reports it's all safe. For example, try any of the Russian synonyms for "shit". "говно" transliterates to "govno" and both check out as safe.
semicolondev 11y ago
Submitted bunch of Nepali swear words. People in Nepal will laugh out a loud when English speaking people talk about renting a Condo or generating a Rand number. Here are few /swear/ words in Nepali (Spoken by ~30M people) Chick Goo Moose Turi Condo Moot Rand Chalk Lado PuT Fuse If you are wondering what these words mean check this: http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Nepali http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Nepali
- igravious 11y ago
  Turi and Lado are not words in English? (Unless I'm very much mistaken). All the other's are, bar Rand, but that is a variable name beloved of coders!
  - semicolondev 11y ago
    Turi prefixes Turing (which means the act of pissing in Nepali) and Lado is popular in Spanish i guess.
- xigency 11y ago
  Sounds like a good reason to not open a business in Nepal.
616c 11y ago
Obligatory Arabic story of the last few years: the Pakistani ambassador who was rejected for service in the Gulf, because his name is Akbar Zib. This is Arabic for biggest cock. https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D8%B1%20%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%20%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%A8%D8%B1%20%D8%B2%D8%A8 https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%... No reputable source mentions this; only crap newspapers in different countries mention this. But every person I know in the Arab world knows this internet meme. Almost as bad as naming your son after a deceased Libyan dictator, before he was dead of course. Perhaps I know one of those too. Talking about parenting jokes.
- ndrscr 11y ago
  There's a guy on Israeli TV named גיא פינס--pronounced "Guy Penis." How's that for a name?
  - ccleve 11y ago
    The classic example of this is the Ford Pinto. That was a naming mistake. (Try it)
- jpatokal 11y ago
  A former Finnish ambassador to Cairo had the first names "Aapo Esa". As classic/written Arabic has neither "p" not "e", this turned into "Abu Isa", meaning "Father of Jesus"! This wasn't actually quite as hilarious in Arabic as you'd think, since "Isa" is a fairly common first name and "Abu X" is a standard way to refer to a man with a son, but definitely good for a few chuckles back home...
pablomolnar 11y ago
As we are in the subject, does the brand names "Dickies" "Dick's Sporting Goods" or even the character "Dick Tracy" seems awkward name choices for US people/native english speakers? As a ESL, the first time I heard of them it was kind of funny. I guess when one grows up in the context of those names is not that appalling...
- cmpb 11y ago
  You're exactly right. Growing up with the words removes them from being recognizable as dirty. Note also, Dick is a name (or nickname for Richard). Language is weird sometimes...
RIMR 11y ago
So there's a restaurant near me called "Pho King". It's pho king delicious. Anyway, this tool doesn't know how 'pho' is pronounced in Vietnamese because it didn't catch it.
sytelus 11y ago
This would sell much better as baby name checker.
AtlasLion 11y ago
Searched for Tina but it found nothing, in North Africa it means pu$$y,
- markdown 11y ago
  What are we, five year olds? Pussy.
adad95 11y ago
"GIT" is safe. hehehehe
markdown 11y ago
How do you account for spelling? In Fijian, "caita" means "fuck" or "fuck it", but the word is pronounced "thaita". From a fijian perspective, seeing both "caita" and "thaita" would bring the swear-word to mind.
kinow 11y ago
There's a company here in New Zealand called RaboDirect. Rabo means "tail" in Portuguese (and in Spanish maybe?). But it can also mean arse or ass. In most cases I'd think people were talking about arses than about tails. This was not caught by wordsafety :/ Not sure if you are breaking up words. I remember a friend told me about some algorithm that works for that, and is used by German linguists... not exactly stemmers, but there was another thing that could be useful too. Anyway, thanks for sharing! Looking great.
avar 11y ago
I looked up "Bora". No results. The Volkswagen Bora was somewhat famous in Iceland because "Bora" means "Anus". You could drive the Volkswagen Anus! The vendor went out of its way to mispronounce the name in their TV ads as "Bóra", which would be like pronouncing "Anus" as "Aneece" or something like that.
gre 11y ago
mensa means stupid in spanish.
philfrasty 11y ago
wix.com should have had a look at that site...
cosmez 11y ago
No results found for this search. There's a reasonable chance that it's safe... But you can never be quite sure. There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Somewhere deep in the Amazonian jungle, "anal" could be an insult that gets you killed.
- princeb 11y ago
  not only that (incomplete coverage of languages) - words can also have phonetic similarities to vulgarities without the same spelling.
rlidwka 11y ago
It doesn't list the word "Belgium". Even though according to Douglas Adams that's the most offensive word in the galaxy. :)
wordbank 11y ago
You'll have a real hard time with Slavic languages. ;) Trying to add all the things you missed meanwhile.
candeira 11y ago
One of the most recent corporate mishaps I've learned of is Microsoft Nokia calling their phone "Lumia", when in Spain "lumi" or "lumia" is an informal word to mean "prostitute". Your app doesn't reflect that. I was going to say that you need to source slang dictionaries, but this one is in the Diccionario de la Real Academia: http://buscon.rae.es/drae/srv/search?val=lumia http://buscon.rae.es/drae/srv/search?val=lumia And even in the first random online bilingual dictionary Google threw up: http://diccionario.sensagent.com/lumi/es-en/ http://diccionario.sensagent.com/lumi/es-en/ So maybe do a bit of scraping/spidering of multilingual dictionaries, starting with your collected list of bad words?
- dbbolton 11y ago
  I think Wiktionary is a great and underutilized resource. Fairly good coverage, free, and easily amendable. There is in fact an entry for lumia: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumia#Spanish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumia#Spanish It's actually the basis for a site called The Alternative Dictionaries which features "colorful extracts": http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net/ http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net/
garfieldnate 11y ago
Funny, it gets Siri, which has to be katakana-ized specially, but it misses both ketu and ketsu. What kind of database are you using? This is a great idea, by the way.
wyclif 11y ago
'Results for “nova”: Spanish: did you know that the popular anecdote about the Chevrolet Nova is an urban legend? Google for "snopes nova".' I liked that.
SNvD7vEJ 11y ago
Yeah, also, a classic one we had here in Sweden: Honda released this new small car model named "Honda Fitta", and one of the slogans were something like "small on the outside, large on inside". In Swedish, "Fitta" is a crude word for female genitalia. The car was quickly renamed "Honda Jazz". A link to a Swedish article, translated by Google: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.automotorsport.se%2Fartiklar%2Fnyheter%2F20020403%2Ffitta-blev-dyr-affar-for-honda&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
- DonaldFisk 11y ago
  I was going to post something about this myself, but decided it was still unverified. The Auto Motor & Sport article was as far as the trail took me. It quotes the Dagens Nyheter, which in turn quotes an anonymous Japanese car magazine, whose article may or may not be true (if it exists at all). This has the hallmarks of an urban legend: Japanese car manufacturers do have previous form with the Toyota MR2 and Mitsubishi Pajero, so the story is plausible; there's a moral here; and the story has not been followed all the way to its original source.
Hydral1k 11y ago
Interesting. You even have support for converting ß to ss. e.g. scheissekopf -> scheiße
thetruthseeker1 11y ago
It will be great if the program checks for phonetically similar words as well, currently, looks like it doesn't. Bhat (India), pronounced like 'butt' is not flagged.
bernardom 11y ago
I added "cu" (Portuguese for "ass"), but I'm not able to get it to match. Guessing there's a size limit? I wonder if it makes sense to add "ku" as well? When I was a kid, I'd always giggle at the American candy bar "Kudos." This is really cool.... Kudos.
carrotleads 11y ago
tried a few words from Indian languages and got matches for other languages.. Interesting to see how you have implemented this...
dark_knight3141 11y ago
Very nice ! could save the day in foreign country
jagermo 11y ago
The guys at Wix should have had that before they entered the german market.
solidpy 11y ago
If you are still here, it would be useful if we could link to a word, e.g.: http://wordsafety.com?word=dimwit http://wordsafety.com?word=dimwit
V-2 11y ago
It's reasonably good - I tested it for Polish swearwords, it misses some no-nos, such as "alfons" (which stands for "pimp"), I actually submitted this :) It reminded me of this major company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osram whose name happens to be "future tense conjugation of verb >to shit<" (a spot-on match, and the website correctly detects it) :) It was founded in 1919 when the website didn't exist yet

431 points by randall 11y ago

It's great :-) However, could I Suggest there are two markets for this and you might be falling between two stools. Firstly there is the market we have here - looking for dirty words in different languages. I love the petites bites ad - and it would be great to have a crowd sourced "daily WTF" site of amusing failures But the usage of your site looks ... Serious, with half an eye maybe on charging marketing departments for access. Which is almost impossible because no sane database can catch MR2. But if the entertainment site catches on, you have a ready made list of reliable dirty-minded experts whose private opinions and double entendres you can charge marketing depts to put their ideas in front of them - confidentially ensuring they don't screw up. And given that the number of language to language potential screwups is n^^2 and the experts are n you should be ok. Anyway - it's a lovely idea and reminds me of Douglas Adams' "Go stick your head in a pig".

eterm 11y ago

There needs to be a "No results found" type result. Currently it's impossible to tell the difference between no result and an empty result.

cwkoss 11y ago

Anyone find any real-world matches? I was able to get positives by typing in foreign curses directly, but couldn't find any startups with foreign curses in their name.

lclemente 11y ago
"airbnb" results in “ayr” Arabic: penis The only one I could find, so just bad luck :)
elros 11y ago
Not a startup, but yesterday I was impressed with the font Skolar, which name I mistakenly remembered as Skola, and apparently it's considered close enough to "Chola", which is Hindi for clitoris. The "level of worriness" does go down (pun intended) when I type the font's correct name.
eterm 11y ago
Wikipedia was the closest I found, not really a start up though.

maartenscholl 11y ago

I think this should also do a phoneme based comparison, for example the photo sharing website Flickr is pronounced like this word (as a slang word it is well known) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flikker https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flikker

sovok 11y ago
Or wix.com, which sounds like wichs in German (wank).
- pluma 11y ago
  The amazing thing about wix.com is that they went all-out with their marketing in Germany and embraced the phonetic similarity. I'm not sure what audience they're aiming for by having the ads consist of people explaining that (and how) they wank -- with the obvious "twist ending" where they make it clear they're referring to using their product rather than masturbating. But I guess anyone turned off their product by the "racy" ads likely would have avoided it because of the name in the first place.
ludamad 11y ago
Do you know of any high-quality phonemic dictionaries?
- schoen 11y ago
  There is such a thing for English, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Very, very useful, although specific to American English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Pronouncing_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Pronouncing_Dictionary I've succeeding in using it to solve puzzles that had to do with how words were pronounced, as opposed to how they were spelled.

serverholic 11y ago

FYI this doesn't check for words that sound like swear words. For example, it'll detect Fuck but not Fack.

eterm 11y ago
With the input box I suspect they want the database to be crowdsourced. I wonder if they vet the input, if we all try hard enough might we get hackernews into the swear list?

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Is a start. How about death and failure type words? Muerta doesn't elicit any warning. And 'Nova' is famous for its Spanish meaning (apocryphal?) - words like that might be hard to catch.

davidw 11y ago

Italian one needs work. It did not have 'minchia' in it, which is no longer even all that regional, AFAIK. Didn't have 'mona' either, although that could be foregiven as it's dialect in the Veneto.

ragazzina 11y ago
italian is definitely lacking. it doesn't recognize STOCATSO nor ESTIGRANQATSI nor euphemisms such as patata, passera..

anEasternGoat 11y ago

poo is all good.

PaulHoule 11y ago

The phonetic matching doesn't catch "Phuck"

lvh 11y ago

Excellent idea, but the lists need to be expanded. Didn't catch any of the Slavic words I threw its way.

mcorrand 11y ago

"bite" is safe according to this tool. Any french speaker does a double take when they see that word though, especially in certain sentences. For reference: https://askafrenchguy.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/petite-bites-pauvre-nancy/ https://askafrenchguy.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/petite-bites-... Edit: Yes, I have submitted it to the database, it should get vetted eventually. A crowdsourced process for the vetting could be fun too!

backtoyoujim 11y ago
much less "bitenuker" which is highly offensive to those who speak either French or Dutch.
- rgj 11y ago
  I'm Dutch and I know my offensive language. Never heard of that.
  - protonfish 11y ago
    It's a joke from 30 Rock.
  - ruraljuror 11y ago
    A Franco-Dutchman would pronounce it bete-neuker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqszqbd5cLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqszqbd5cLg
baby 11y ago
"pipi" as well http://i.imgur.com/VcSKnTb.png http://i.imgur.com/VcSKnTb.png
- flurpitude 11y ago
  "zizi" too.
  - r0naa 11y ago

limaoscarjuliet 11y ago

Do not trust yet - list is not complete. Some known Polish bad words are not there.

aluhut 11y ago
Phonetic does not work also. Tried qrwa, qurwa, kuhrwa,. Nothing. They also find hui (russian) but not huj or chuj.
- yetihehe 11y ago
  Yeah, I've had some fine time trying to remember most of polish swear words. But it will probably never properly take into account the variety of word "pierdolić".

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Rockdtben 11y ago
There is a form to submit words that are missing.

elros 11y ago

I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Things like, the nonexistent English word "bocket" sounding like Brazilian slang for blowjob ("boquete"), but only when spoken the way a Brazilian would. I think this cross-pronouncing thing would actually be harder to tackle: It's more important to try to match the way users on their home locale would say the foreign term, than the way the foreign people would say it. To illustrate what I mean, consider the word Skype, said in Portuguese, is pronounced as if it were spelt in English as "Shkuipy" (I mean [ʃkaj'pi]).

pavlov 11y ago
I'd be really interested in knowing how do they do the phonetic matching. Honestly, the code for that sucks. It just looks for specific variations of letter combinations. I guess a more robust approach would try to build up a real phonetic representation of the word, then apply various languages' orthographic rules to that to check for matches.
- timpark 11y ago
  I'm no expert on phonetic matching, but a product I worked on many years ago used Soundex. (It's meant for English pronunciation, so you'd have to research other languages) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    Soundex is optimized for collapsing the spelling of names into a common key and isn't so hot for general words. Metaphone would be a more useful matching algorithm. It also preserves a legible spelling so that you can pass the result onto further fuzzy matching stages like an edit distance measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone
toufka 11y ago
It doesn't do phonetic matching. A big flaw. Baca returns nothing, Baka returns 'idiot/er in Japanese'.

tucif 11y ago

It would be nice this detected double meaning phrases, although it might be hard to implement. In spanish many combinations of 'safe' words will generate very 'unsafe' meanings, probably many other languages too.

maartenscholl 11y ago

"expertsexchange" only matches the Chinese “cha”, and not "sex" or "sexchange".

sanbor 11y ago
That reminds me to the name "KIDSEXCHANGE". [Picture of the store](http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/blog/blog-images/kidsexchange-weird-name.jpg http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/blog/blog-images/kidsexcha...).
vitd 11y ago
Yeah, it seems like it either doesn't match english words (probably because it assumes you already speak English since it's an English-language web site), or it is only looking for specific types of matches (swear words, etc.). I tried merder.com, since I know that "merde" is french for "shit" and it sounds like "murder.com". It caught "merde", but didn't catch "murder". I then tried "murder.com" and it was like, "Yep! Looks good! Go for it!" (I may be paraphrasing.)
tomkwok 11y ago
Coincidentally cha1 ("1" here means the first tone in pinyin) is a sexual innuendo alluding to sexual intercourse. The character itself, which means "to insert", has nothing to do with sex in normal usage though. And most importantly, there is virtually zero resemblance between the pronunciation of "change" and that of "cha1". > to have sex (lit. insert). > Source: a long list of Chinese profanity on Wikipedia.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese_profanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese_profanity

pavlov 11y ago

Hey guys, I made this last week as a two-evening side project. Happy to see it posted here, thanks randall! I know the word lists aren't complete. This was the best I could do given the time constraint, the fact that I don't actually speak 19 languages... And also, after two evenings of googling dirty words, I started feeling like I'm about to acquire Tourette's in some unknown language ;) I'll update the database with the words submitted here and through the form on the site. Thanks! -- Edit -- here's Google Analytics for this site after 1 hour on the HN frontpage: http://wordsafety.com/img/analytics_2015-08-25_1736.jpg http://wordsafety.com/img/analytics_2015-08-25_1736.jpg This is a site that had essentially zero traffic before HN, so I figured this would be a potentially interesting glimpse into HN's audience.

aladdinw 11y ago
I will be happy to help with arabic words
- pavlov 11y ago
  Don't hesitate to submit on the site, it's very welcome! (I'm going to vet them manually when I have a moment.)
  - yetihehe 11y ago
    I've seen some words with bad meanings, like "cipa" means "polish: penis" according to your site, but it actually means "vagina" (quite the opposite ;) ). Is it good if I just submit better meanings ?
azeirah 11y ago
I'm so proud of you <3 http://i.imgur.com/bMQK9vU.png http://i.imgur.com/bMQK9vU.png
- pavlov 11y ago
  Indeed your reply was the reason I made this, so thanks :)

tptacek 11y ago

Misses "matasano" -> "quack doctor".

gfrench27 11y ago

like a construction company responsible for erections, perhaps?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

osipov 11y ago

It fails on the classic Nova check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urban_legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urba...

pavlov 11y ago
It would be really hard to capture this kind of double meaning that only applies to a certain product category... "Doesn't go" is certainly an unwanted association for a car, but it wouldn't matter for most products. To make it more complicated, "nova" actually has the same astronomical meaning in Spanish as in English: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova So it's fine in some contexts, bad in some very specific context. Someone smarter than me will probably crack problems like this with AI...
xd1936 11y ago
Yup. http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png
kissickas 11y ago
Did you read that link? > This has since been debunked. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

cmenge 11y ago

It wouldn't have saved Mitsubishi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero But I like the idea and will submit a few words

bbrazil 11y ago

Doesn't catch "tineh", which is apparently a derogatory term for Indians http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tineh http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tineh, so probably wise to also check UD and Google. I was going to have that as part of my company name until I discovered that (tineh is a transliteration of the word for "fire" in Irish).

DarkContinent 11y ago

I tried Tessa and it means "to pee." How come it is not on the list? I know it's not a swear word, but it's still a name with negative connotations.

Rockdtben 11y ago
There is a form to submit words that are missing.

JJN 11y ago

Wang. No results found! Kimmy. No results found! Interesting.

Rockdtben 11y ago
There is a form to submit words that are missing.

werber 11y ago

This is really a shame, I would hate to see unintentionally awful things in corporate media go away!

xd1936 11y ago

Solid. http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png http://i.imgur.com/tnjNMs1.png

dandrino 11y ago
For those who don't get the reference, there is an urban legend that the Chevy Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because "no va" translates to "no go".

akie 11y ago

It literally fails on the first word I tried, the/a Dutch word for 'penis': http://imgur.com/Mw6Efx0 http://imgur.com/Mw6Efx0

sanbor 11y ago

Tried the Spanish word "pajero" (usually translated to "wanker" or "tosser"). Mitsubishi named a car "Pajero" and they had to change the name to "Montero" in Spanish speaking countries. Another unfortunate car name is Suzuki Moco. This word neither appears in this app. "Moco" means "snot" or "booger" in Spanish.

cossatot 11y ago
I have found it's important when emailing/texting in Spanish to put the tilde in 'año', when I normally wouldn't bother with an American keyboard.
- ghurtado 11y ago
  US-Based native Spanish speaker here. Very important indeed, specially when asking someone their age :) Whenever the ñ is not available (foreign keyboards, mobile, etc...), a decent substitute is "anyo", which is phonetically equivalent and also happens to be the Ladino variant of the word.
  - pvaldes 11y ago
    Agno is safer (same idea as in 'gnu'). "Anyo" is close phonetically to "anillo", that is a ring, but also a common source of jokes about little Frodo's sexuallity.
    - notNow 11y ago
      I think Catalan people don't have the "ñ" letter in their alphabet and they use instead this combination "ny" for that particular sound.
      - pvaldes 11y ago
        Well, catalan people have the ñ letter in their alphabet because they are spaniards, is just that some of them prefer to ignore this for political reasons, and they choose instead to do simple things complicated. Both systems are a question of convenience, so no one is perfect. You can choose between the useful (and trendy in two or three spanish communities) "ny" or the older "gn" charged of historical context and showing lots of connections with other latin languages like french. Be aware also that "ny" leads easily to a "nll" sound that can be annoying, specially when is placed next to an 'i'. This is just a personal opinion. Is perfecty ok if you think different, but if you are interested in mastering the second language with more native speakers in the world, I'll suggest to avoid the political experiments of the modern catalan and save yourself a lot of future headaches with grammar and orthography. To replace the 'ñ' by '~n' will work in most of the cases also.

iskander 11y ago

Missed a few of the ones I tried: "zina" "eir" "khuee" "popa"

nutjob123 11y ago

Results for “home” “ho” English: woman Direct match at start or end, potentially serious issue! 335 million native speakers, about 1.5 billion speakers in total.

tegansnyder 11y ago

There might be a good service in this as an API.

raverbashing 11y ago

Maybe it should include English words as well? Beaver returns nothing 'caca' and 'pede' do return, so props for that 'bosta' matches but maybe Josta should? 'sharmuta' also matches (with a different spelling, but it's probably a variation)

pimlottc 11y ago
Yes, it seems to be missing a fair bit of English slang, like "fanny", "root", "gigolo"...

seany 11y ago

This falls into they "why bother" class of things for me. You're never going to catch `everything`, and this stuff almost always causes very broken edge cases for people. I can't use my real last name at the apple genius bar last I checked because it's "offensive"...

schoen 11y ago

This seems like a nice idea, but many of the comments here are pointing to omissions that the people commenting feel could be serious. I guess I see six kinds of potential difficulties: ① There are so many languages out there, including languages will millions of speakers who might eventually come across your thing. Maybe that's not an issue for tangible products that will be marketed to specific territories. ② There are so many slang terms out there; each individual language might well have thousands of terms that have a rude, sexual, or excretory meaning, or that are used as a slur against some group. Also, some languages have expletives that don't correspond to expletives in other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity ③ People have pointed out that phonetic matching is hard when you're dealing with different languages' orthographies and phonologies, and you can have the problem of "the source language's intended pronunciation sounds like an offensive word in the other language", "the other language's likely pronunciation of the written term sounds like an offensive word in the other language", or even other combinations among highly multilingual populations. "Sounds like" is sometimes challenging to automate in software, for example because epenthesis of a vowel may not be enough to remove the association. (But I think Levenshtein edit distance between phonemic transcriptions can kind of sort of work.) Also, the "MR2" example someone gave shows that understanding how people will pronounce something in different languages is complicated: you have to know that the number two in French is "deux" /dø/. ④ People might also perceive something as an offensive reference that isn't even familiar to people elsewhere, like a reference to an upsetting person, place, or event. Reportedly some people in India have named people and businesses after Adolf Hitler just because he was famous, for example. I bet it's easy to do this cross-culturally in general. ⑤ As people point out with the Chevy Nova story, there might be a reason why a product name would become the target of ridicule in a particular language even if it's not offensive. That's true even if it didn't literally happen to the Chevy Nova. ⑥ It might even turn out that the space of offensive references is so dense that there is nothing that isn't a near-homophone of something pretty offensive in some language. Anyway, I think this project is really neat; I'm just reminded from people's comments that natural language is hard! There's scope to keep expanding this site, and I think there are also existing "cultural consultant" businesses that try to deal with these problems through human review (I wonder how many of them have consultants on contract from many widely varying cultures, which seems especially useful in the Internet era).

magic_beans 11y ago

"Bite"... means "dick" in french...

orf 11y ago

Interesting, I recently found out that one of my usernames on a popular game means "shitman" in finnish or swedish, not through this site though (and it doesn't appear to bring anything up). Great idea though! Also the word search field has an XSS, try entering "<script>alert(1)</script>". Not sure if it's a big deal but it's good to be safe.

arihant 11y ago

So this seems to work for a very small subset of the words I typed. Also, it seems to only check against dictionary meaning and not cultural usage. "Tatsu" means "to stand" in Japanese, but is culturally used for erection. This is just an example, I tried a bunch which I know and none were flagged.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
I think this is a case of 'the product is YOU!' notice the little box 'enter word here'? :P
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  That box doesn't seem to permit adding cultural referents / context. If we added all normal words that can have another meaning, it'd flag almost everything.
_0nac 11y ago
"Tatsu" is the verb stem and would not be offensive alone; in fact, like most Japanese words, it has plenty of homonyms including 竜, "dragon". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A4#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A4#Japanese Flagging that would be kind of like flagging "hard" in English. Could it potentially be offensive in the wrong context? Yes. Are there brands where that would be absolutely fine? Yes.

hokkos 11y ago

Doesn't work in French : caca, bite

scoopr 11y ago

Ah good, it matches ‘perse’, which was a slight amusement when seeing the expensive clothing brand ‘James Perse’ while visiting the US :)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

hougaard 11y ago

Missing danish ! There are some really good curse words in danish :)

Someone 11y ago

"Results for “Hello” “hell” English: heck Direct match at start or end, potentially serious issue! 335 million native speakers, about 1.5 billion speakers in total." Isn't that overdoing it a little?

Retra 11y ago
False positives are far more useful than false negatives.

dradtke 11y ago

It didn't catch anything on "phuck," despite claiming that it checks phonetically. Still a nice idea, though.

berbatof 11y ago

Aren't you the creator of Pixel Conduit? I used your tool for some VFX works and recently saw that you are creating software for web animations, but it ia a surprise to see you come up with such a tool. By the way, I am planning to create a slang database for Turkish and Turkic languages. I would like to share the database with you as I develop.

petercooper 11y ago

I've submitted it but it brought up nothing for "wog". Did this due to the "wogrammer"/"wog" issue pointed out on Twitter yesterday. I haven't heard it in recent years but "wog" was used much like the n-word when I was a kid in the UK and appears to still carry some of that meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog "slope" is another, but I don't know if I'll submit it since no-one seemed to have heard of it at the time. Jeremy Clarkson got in trouble over it though - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/top-gear/10995483/Jeremy-Clarksons-slope-joke-on-Top-Gear-was-deliberate-use-of-racist-term-Ofcom-rules.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/top-gear/10995483/Jeremy... I absolutely love the idea of having a newsletter on the backend full of awful words submitted though - a rather "cute" idea.

mrbig4545 11y ago

It says "pute" is fine, but google translate says otherwise… edit: I submitted it

ecesena 11y ago

Suggestion for improvement: numbers. I was about to name a project "Plate88", and a couple of people independently pointed out a reference to the nazi salute [1]. We then renamed it to Plate28, hopefully safer. Anyway, maybe worth considering these use cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)

protomyth 11y ago
Which brings us to the second part of naming things. I wouldn't tell someone in NASCAR country that 88 means a nazi salute unless you really want to offend.
- ecesena 11y ago
  Exactly -- we want to do a healthy/educational thing, imagine our surprise knowing that...
  - protomyth 11y ago
    I guess I would say the bad meaning of 88 is not very relevant and certainly shouldn't stop a company operating in Asia from using it. Heck, a golf company using 88 would mean double snowmen rather than any dark meaning beyond a bad score.
DavidAdams 11y ago
When my son was about 5, he picked up on the fact that the number 88 sounds a lot like "idiot," so he got a lot of pleasure out of yelling "88" all the time. It's become part of our family folklore. I take a lot of pleasure associating white nationalism with the word idiot now.

olympus 11y ago

I saw this and immediately thought of an old story where General Motors tried to sell the Chevy Nova in South America. It hardly sold at all in South America even though it was a hugely popular car in North America. The reason turned out to be that "No va" in Spanish translates to "won't go" so GM was basically trying to sell a sporty car with a misleading name. Unfortunately this website wouldn't have helped GM sell the Nova since it's only looking for profanity, but I think that the concept is great and clearly needed. I hope you develop it further and get to make some money off of it. Great job!

nerevarthelame 11y ago
For what it's worth, the "Nova" story is a myth: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
- rmetzler 11y ago
  Here is a whole list of cultural misunderstandings of car manufacturers http://www.oddee.com/item_93544.aspx http://www.oddee.com/item_93544.aspx
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jjxw 11y ago
  That was the first thing I attempted to search for and the output from the site is: Spanish: did you know that the popular anecdote about the Chevrolet Nova is an urban legend? Google for "snopes nova". It's a nice detail.
deleted 11y ago
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notNow 11y ago
But I guess it sold like hot cakes in Brazil, didn't it?

linkydinkandyou 11y ago

It knows Russian (good!) but not Hebrew.

jstoiko 11y ago

Just tried the word "crotte" which means "dung" in french. It returned "No results found for this search. It looks likely that it's safe." Phew, it's a good thing I speak french :)

briholt 11y ago

It doesn't have "pinche" which is about the most common Mexican curse word.

hiraki9 11y ago

Similar app for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/profanity-check/id923020053 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/profanity-check/id923020053 Blog post: http://blog.lexiconbranding.com/2015/05/12/our-first-iphone-app-profanity-check/ http://blog.lexiconbranding.com/2015/05/12/our-first-iphone-...

BasDirks 11y ago

submitted a bunch in Dutch.

paulsutter 11y ago

Excellent idea. Given the number of people here who missed the "add a word" function, you might want to mention it up top with a negative result. > No results found for this search. It looks likely that it's safe... say this in hopes to get fuller coverage because it looks like a useful tool.

pavlov 11y ago
I updated the "no results" text, thanks!

alanh 11y ago

> We respect your privacy — input is never logged or monitored. Except it is logged and monitored by the US Government because this site uses unencrypted HTTP. Otherwise, a commendable sentiment…

RomanPushkin 11y ago

pajero is not safe

marianov 11y ago
Was the first thing I tried being from Argentina. Big fail.

ivankirigin 11y ago

I searched "gift" expecting "poison" from German, and was disappointed when nothing came up.

GhotiFish 11y ago

Where was this when these guys were picking their name? http://pidora.ca/ http://pidora.ca/

vaskas 11y ago
155 million native speakers.

sterl 11y ago

Missing Zune which means Penis in Quebec.

Aardwolf 11y ago

Doesn't support even the most dirty Dutch words! Could use more languages :)

randunel 11y ago

It doesn't match some balkanic or eastern european words. Some of us don't appreciate tracking links, please get rid of tracking so we don't have to manually edit the urls.

BasDirks 11y ago

Dutch: http://www.taalkabaal.nl/scheldwoorden/indexa.php http://www.taalkabaal.nl/scheldwoorden/indexa.php Have fun. Some of these are spelled incorrectly, so run them through a spell-checker. While I'm at it, let me translate some personal favourites. I realize they are quite long and unlikely candidates for the next hot SF start-up, but why keep knowledge away from the masses: adderengebroedsels - offspring of vipers argeologisch kontfossiel - archaeological ass fossil bosuil - Strix aluco duinbewoner - dune dweller ebverzuiper - person who drowns during ebb (burnnn) greppelheks - ditch witch ingeblikte atlas - canned atlas (??) janksnor - literally "crying mustache" kamelenzuurvleesoog - literally "camels-Sauerbraten-eye" (???) mountendeldarmbeklimmer -- literally "climber of Mt. rectum" paashaasschaamhaarverzamelaar -- literally "collector of Easter Bunny pubes" rioolpinguin -- sewer pinguin tepelbaviaan -- nipple baboon I have submitted several short and useful Dutch words to grant myself license for this comment.

itsybitsycoder 11y ago
I want to start a razor startup now just so I can call it Janksnor.
- devbug 11y ago
  Dollar Shave Club... but for Scandinavia. Or a brutally fast Handlebars implementation.
nice_byte 11y ago
> kontfossiel LMAO :')
digi_owl 11y ago
> bosuil - Strix aluco Huh?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
magic_beans 11y ago

gernig 11y ago

Searched for Imen, nothing. Lousy program

randall 11y ago
Fix it then! Contribute. This is a 2 day program. Help him out!

odabaxok 11y ago

I believe you can make a good use of http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ to update your database, because there are also lot of foreign words, which you miss at the moment. (pula - Romanian for dick, fasz - Hungarian for dick, piča - Czech/Slovak for cunt, etc.)

anonfunction 11y ago
They have an unofficial API[1] that could be used. [1] http://api.urbandictionary.com/v0/define?term=culo http://api.urbandictionary.com/v0/define?term=culo

pvaldes 11y ago

One of the funniest in Spain: facultad (faculty). An innocent word, with a very common and poisoned abbreviature. "Nos vamos a la fac" (We go to the university). English speakers always hear another thing. Totally homophone with the called "f-word"

paulnechifor 11y ago

While you have this on the front page, why not start a repo where people can send pull requests, rather than submit one word at a time?

personlurking 11y ago

Pretty cool. And the example I chose, funny. I searched "foda" (f--- in Brazil) just to try it out, here's the result, which actually mentions the Amazon. http://i.imgur.com/CUpSgN6.png http://i.imgur.com/CUpSgN6.png

schoen 11y ago
You don't have to go very deep into the Amazon at all for that to be an insult. :-) What an amusing example.

normloman 11y ago

This doesn't work for Esperanto. Fiku vin!

rramdin 11y ago

I've been blessed to name my new startup "Phucker."

probinso 11y ago
"phuck" works as well

maxhou 11y ago

I'd have expected a small easteregg for the word "bro" ;)

orjan 11y ago

"He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that checked if the made-up word meant "dickhead" or something in Chinese or Swedish." -- William Gibson, "Mona Lisa Overdrive" https://books.google.se/books?id=QojrNYyGMyEC&pg=PA118#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.se/books?id=QojrNYyGMyEC&pg=PA118#v=one...

zobzu 11y ago

tried a few common insults in my native tongue (french) and it detected none...

sandworm101 11y ago

It's missing rather a big one. "Mist" means something very different in german. My point: Is this connected to dictionaries or is it all crowdsourced data?

personlurking 11y ago
Isn't 'mist' like 'darn' in English?
- sandworm101 11y ago
  http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Mist.html http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Mist.html Mist {m} [ugs.] crap [vulg.] rubbish [esp. Br.] [nonsense] bullshit <BS> [vulg.] tripe [coll.] garbage [fig.] bull [derived from bullshit] [Am.] [vulg.]
- pluma 11y ago
  "Darn" is a minced oath. Mist, simply means "crap" or "manure". A pile of manure is called "Misthaufen" (crap heap), a pitchfork for handling manure is called "Mistforke" or "Mistgabel" (crap fork). It's a bit vulgar but so is the subject matter. But you can also use it as a general expression of discontent: "Mist!" is something you might exclaim if you just dropped something expensive and fragile. It's still vulgar but it's something you'd find far more appropriate around the young ones than the harsher "Scheiße!" (shit). It's basically the little brother of "shit" in the same way as "dumb" is the little brother of "retarded". You might legitimately hear someone curse at the "Mistkatze" (Katze = cat) that just peed on the bed, or the "Mistauto" (Auto = car) that refuses to start or simply shout "So ein Mist!" when they find out they've spent the past hour aligning the wallpaper upside down. The equivalent of "damn" would be "verdammt" and there are minced oaths for that in German as well (although nowadays they're generally considered cute and not something you'd use only because you're mild-mannered or religious).
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    Man, don't put "dumb" anywhere near "retarded". I don't want another literal user for a word (retarded=delayed, dumb=mute) to disappear in the name of political correctness. To quote from TGOTG: "This dumb tree, he is my friend." Groot is dumb because his is effectively a mute. Drax was not commenting in any way on his intelligence.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

donatj 11y ago

> Results for “boomerang” > “bum” > English: butt > Direct match at start or end, potentially serious issue! lol.

fabiofzero 11y ago

Found a hole on my first try. 'Foda' in Portuguese is 'fuck', yet the app deemed it to be safe. 'Foda-se' (fuck you) wasn't there either - submitted both.

mojobot 11y ago

False positive: "hat" was flagged for "idiot" in English. I can't find a dictionary with that definition, and it's not one that I'm familiar with as a native speaker.

temuze 11y ago

This is great! There are certain puns/combos that would be really hard to catch though. For example - the Ford Nova. In Spanish, it literally translates to "no va" "doesn't go". Terrible name for a car. I'm unsure how to make this understand the context of the product, but that would be the next step

unholiness 11y ago
"Colgate" similarly passed. In Spanish, it's the imperative command "Hang yourself".
notNow 11y ago
But "nova" in Portuguese means "new" so I guess Ford was in the safe side with that product name.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nvader 11y ago
I've always been pretty skeptical about Nova in particular. It's like an English speaker going to a restaurant named "Notable": we wouldn't expect to have to eat on the floor.
jpatokal 11y ago
Not really: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

joshmn 11y ago

I use a similar method to find brandable names and domain names. I'll input a word or synonym of into Google Lang Tools and translate it into all the available languages. I've had really good success in doing so.

return0 11y ago

Doesnt detect any greek curse words

tomsmeding 11y ago

It seems that "fuk" is not recognised as sounding like "fuck". Might want to look at that phonetic matcher :)

edeion 11y ago
While it could help some people around to know about it: http://www.tripadvisor.fr/Restaurant_Review-g298113-d4906941-Reviews-Fukyu_an-Takayama_Gifu_Prefecture_Chubu.html http://www.tripadvisor.fr/Restaurant_Review-g298113-d4906941...

tsotha 11y ago

If only Miyazaki would have had this when he named Laputa: Castle in the sky

jcl 11y ago
FWIW, he got the name from Jonathan Swift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa
- tsotha 11y ago
  Who... apparently didn't speak Spanish.
  - desdiv 11y ago
    >As "la puta" means "the whore" (see Spanish profanity), some Spanish editions of "Gulliver's Travels" use "Lapuntu", "Laput", "Lapuda" and "Lupata" as bowdlerisations. It is likely, given Swift's brand of satire, that he was aware of the Spanish meaning. (Gulliver, himself, claimed Spanish among the many languages in which he was fluent.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa

glibgil 11y ago

"cu" gets a pass. https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/cu https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/cu

konne88 11y ago

I would have expected "Coq" to fail.

kruipen 11y ago
Only if it could be formally proved wrong...
xigency 11y ago
I would have expected Cox Communications to fail.

ajonit 11y ago

You seem to have a good grip on Hindi words :) This is a good idea. Last I heard, Accenture spent good amount of $$$ to verify the name in several languages before fixing on that name!

babuskov 11y ago

Is Russian really supported? I tried both Cyrillic and Latin transliteration of some words and it reports it's all safe. For example, try any of the Russian synonyms for "shit". "говно" transliterates to "govno" and both check out as safe.

semicolondev 11y ago

Submitted bunch of Nepali swear words. People in Nepal will laugh out a loud when English speaking people talk about renting a Condo or generating a Rand number. Here are few /swear/ words in Nepali (Spoken by ~30M people) Chick Goo Moose Turi Condo Moot Rand Chalk Lado PuT Fuse If you are wondering what these words mean check this: http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Nepali http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Nepali

igravious 11y ago
Turi and Lado are not words in English? (Unless I'm very much mistaken). All the other's are, bar Rand, but that is a variable name beloved of coders!
- semicolondev 11y ago
  Turi prefixes Turing (which means the act of pissing in Nepali) and Lado is popular in Spanish i guess.
xigency 11y ago
Sounds like a good reason to not open a business in Nepal.

616c 11y ago

Obligatory Arabic story of the last few years: the Pakistani ambassador who was rejected for service in the Gulf, because his name is Akbar Zib. This is Arabic for biggest cock. https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D8%B1%20%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%20%D8%A7%D9%83%D8%A8%D8%B1%20%D8%B2%D8%A8 https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%... No reputable source mentions this; only crap newspapers in different countries mention this. But every person I know in the Arab world knows this internet meme. Almost as bad as naming your son after a deceased Libyan dictator, before he was dead of course. Perhaps I know one of those too. Talking about parenting jokes.

ndrscr 11y ago
There's a guy on Israeli TV named גיא פינס--pronounced "Guy Penis." How's that for a name?
- ccleve 11y ago
  The classic example of this is the Ford Pinto. That was a naming mistake. (Try it)
jpatokal 11y ago
A former Finnish ambassador to Cairo had the first names "Aapo Esa". As classic/written Arabic has neither "p" not "e", this turned into "Abu Isa", meaning "Father of Jesus"! This wasn't actually quite as hilarious in Arabic as you'd think, since "Isa" is a fairly common first name and "Abu X" is a standard way to refer to a man with a son, but definitely good for a few chuckles back home...

pablomolnar 11y ago

As we are in the subject, does the brand names "Dickies" "Dick's Sporting Goods" or even the character "Dick Tracy" seems awkward name choices for US people/native english speakers? As a ESL, the first time I heard of them it was kind of funny. I guess when one grows up in the context of those names is not that appalling...

cmpb 11y ago
You're exactly right. Growing up with the words removes them from being recognizable as dirty. Note also, Dick is a name (or nickname for Richard). Language is weird sometimes...

RIMR 11y ago

So there's a restaurant near me called "Pho King". It's pho king delicious. Anyway, this tool doesn't know how 'pho' is pronounced in Vietnamese because it didn't catch it.

sytelus 11y ago

This would sell much better as baby name checker.

AtlasLion 11y ago

Searched for Tina but it found nothing, in North Africa it means pu$$y,

markdown 11y ago
What are we, five year olds? Pussy.

adad95 11y ago

"GIT" is safe. hehehehe

markdown 11y ago

How do you account for spelling? In Fijian, "caita" means "fuck" or "fuck it", but the word is pronounced "thaita". From a fijian perspective, seeing both "caita" and "thaita" would bring the swear-word to mind.

kinow 11y ago

There's a company here in New Zealand called RaboDirect. Rabo means "tail" in Portuguese (and in Spanish maybe?). But it can also mean arse or ass. In most cases I'd think people were talking about arses than about tails. This was not caught by wordsafety :/ Not sure if you are breaking up words. I remember a friend told me about some algorithm that works for that, and is used by German linguists... not exactly stemmers, but there was another thing that could be useful too. Anyway, thanks for sharing! Looking great.

avar 11y ago

I looked up "Bora". No results. The Volkswagen Bora was somewhat famous in Iceland because "Bora" means "Anus". You could drive the Volkswagen Anus! The vendor went out of its way to mispronounce the name in their TV ads as "Bóra", which would be like pronouncing "Anus" as "Aneece" or something like that.

gre 11y ago

mensa means stupid in spanish.

philfrasty 11y ago

wix.com should have had a look at that site...

cosmez 11y ago

No results found for this search. There's a reasonable chance that it's safe... But you can never be quite sure. There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Somewhere deep in the Amazonian jungle, "anal" could be an insult that gets you killed.

princeb 11y ago
not only that (incomplete coverage of languages) - words can also have phonetic similarities to vulgarities without the same spelling.

rlidwka 11y ago

It doesn't list the word "Belgium". Even though according to Douglas Adams that's the most offensive word in the galaxy. :)

wordbank 11y ago

You'll have a real hard time with Slavic languages. ;) Trying to add all the things you missed meanwhile.

candeira 11y ago

One of the most recent corporate mishaps I've learned of is Microsoft Nokia calling their phone "Lumia", when in Spain "lumi" or "lumia" is an informal word to mean "prostitute". Your app doesn't reflect that. I was going to say that you need to source slang dictionaries, but this one is in the Diccionario de la Real Academia: http://buscon.rae.es/drae/srv/search?val=lumia http://buscon.rae.es/drae/srv/search?val=lumia And even in the first random online bilingual dictionary Google threw up: http://diccionario.sensagent.com/lumi/es-en/ http://diccionario.sensagent.com/lumi/es-en/ So maybe do a bit of scraping/spidering of multilingual dictionaries, starting with your collected list of bad words?

dbbolton 11y ago
I think Wiktionary is a great and underutilized resource. Fairly good coverage, free, and easily amendable. There is in fact an entry for lumia: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumia#Spanish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumia#Spanish It's actually the basis for a site called The Alternative Dictionaries which features "colorful extracts": http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net/ http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net/

garfieldnate 11y ago

Funny, it gets Siri, which has to be katakana-ized specially, but it misses both ketu and ketsu. What kind of database are you using? This is a great idea, by the way.

wyclif 11y ago

'Results for “nova”: Spanish: did you know that the popular anecdote about the Chevrolet Nova is an urban legend? Google for "snopes nova".' I liked that.

SNvD7vEJ 11y ago

Yeah, also, a classic one we had here in Sweden: Honda released this new small car model named "Honda Fitta", and one of the slogans were something like "small on the outside, large on inside". In Swedish, "Fitta" is a crude word for female genitalia. The car was quickly renamed "Honda Jazz". A link to a Swedish article, translated by Google: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.automotorsport.se%2Fartiklar%2Fnyheter%2F20020403%2Ffitta-blev-dyr-affar-for-honda&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

DonaldFisk 11y ago
I was going to post something about this myself, but decided it was still unverified. The Auto Motor & Sport article was as far as the trail took me. It quotes the Dagens Nyheter, which in turn quotes an anonymous Japanese car magazine, whose article may or may not be true (if it exists at all). This has the hallmarks of an urban legend: Japanese car manufacturers do have previous form with the Toyota MR2 and Mitsubishi Pajero, so the story is plausible; there's a moral here; and the story has not been followed all the way to its original source.

Hydral1k 11y ago

Interesting. You even have support for converting ß to ss. e.g. scheissekopf -> scheiße

thetruthseeker1 11y ago

It will be great if the program checks for phonetically similar words as well, currently, looks like it doesn't. Bhat (India), pronounced like 'butt' is not flagged.

bernardom 11y ago

I added "cu" (Portuguese for "ass"), but I'm not able to get it to match. Guessing there's a size limit? I wonder if it makes sense to add "ku" as well? When I was a kid, I'd always giggle at the American candy bar "Kudos." This is really cool.... Kudos.

carrotleads 11y ago

tried a few words from Indian languages and got matches for other languages.. Interesting to see how you have implemented this...

dark_knight3141 11y ago

Very nice ! could save the day in foreign country

jagermo 11y ago

The guys at Wix should have had that before they entered the german market.

solidpy 11y ago

If you are still here, it would be useful if we could link to a word, e.g.: http://wordsafety.com?word=dimwit http://wordsafety.com?word=dimwit

V-2 11y ago

It's reasonably good - I tested it for Polish swearwords, it misses some no-nos, such as "alfons" (which stands for "pimp"), I actually submitted this :) It reminded me of this major company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osram whose name happens to be "future tense conjugation of verb >to shit<" (a spot-on match, and the website correctly detects it) :) It was founded in 1919 when the website didn't exist yet