Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US) an angry argument.

1991

D. Jenkins You Gotta Play Hurt 203: Theo Stoddard [...] slammed his helmet to the ground, and was kicking the Lola and having a cuss fight with his crew.

(US) an obscenity, an oath.

1872		‘Mark Twain’ Innocents at Home 20: He didn’t give a continental for anybody. Beg your pardon, friend, for coming so near saying a cuss-word [JSF].
1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 13 Jun. 22/2: A pious young man up there had a magpie, which […] he had taught to utter cuss-words with the reckless abandon of a Waterloo bottle-merchant and the artistic profusion of a back-block bullock-puncher.
1897		A.H. Lewis Wolfville 217: I’m that profane [...] I reckons towards April probably my soul’s buried onder ten foot of cuss-words.
1900		Bulletin (Sydney) 3 Feb. 14/3: The Australian bullocky isn’t in it for cuss language with the Constantinople Greek.
1902		Gloucester Citizen 26 May 4/6: A Berlin publisher [...] has issued a dictionary of ‘cuss’ words [...] divided into five parts, respectively, for men, for women, for both sexes, for children, and collective ‘cuss’ wiords for use against political partices.
1909		‘O. Henry’ Roads of Destiny 350: I could n’t have whispered a single cuss-word about my native land.
1910		‘O. Henry’ ‘The Call of the Tame’ in Strictly Business (1915) 105: God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss words in the original.
1925		S. Lewis Arrowsmith 225: It’s no worse than the cuss-words you’re always using!
1929		T. Gordon Born to Be (1975) 157: Cussing words were my best way of expressing myself.
1930		E.H. Lavine Third Degree (1931) 175: A former district leader [...] called a police captain every name on the most obscene roster of rare cuss words.
1931		D. Runyon ‘Romance in the Roaring Forties’ in Runyon on Broadway (1954) 32: He [...] never gets out of line in her company by using cuss words.
1939		H. Miller Tropic of Capricorn (1964) 40: He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he’d picked up over there.
1942		L. Bennett ‘De Latis News’ in Jam. Dialect Poems 43: Buy a newspapah, / Yuh wi fine nuff cus-wud eena / ‘Lettas to de edita’.
1943		W. Guthrie Bound for Glory (1969) 356: The whole bunch of thugs made a big run at us sailing cuss words of a million filthy, low-down, ratty kind.
1955		‘Blackie’ Audett Rap Sheet 243: The prison authorities was trying to cool it down in the good old-fashioned way – clubs and cuss words.
1962		(con. WWII) J.O. Killens And Then We Heard The Thunder (1964) 120: His ears picked up the grumbled cusswords under their breaths.
1965		(con. 1930s) R. Wright Lawd Today 155: And did that baby know some cuss words? When she opened up the air’d jump around your head.
1974		D. Goines Daddy Cool (1997) 102: The cuss words didn’t help matters out any.
1980		Jackson & Christian Death Row 201: I haven’t even said a cuss word.
a.1986		‘Old Zebra Dun’ in G. Logsdon Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing (1995) 83: The mortician dropped the lingo that we all had thought so strange. / He now used ev’ry cuss word that the folks use on the range.
1997		G.V. Higgins Change of Gravity [ebook] ‘[W]omen who hear every single cuss-word a man says, even if he says it under his breath, they never seem to be able to hear all the ones they use themselves’.
2000		P. Beatty Tuff 144: ‘How about s-h-i-t — Some Hos In Trouble?’ ‘We can’t be a cuss word. How we going to get any radio play.’.
2000		Guardian Guide 12–18 Feb. 83: Most of the humour stems from simply repeating well-known street slang and cuss words at high volume.
2009		L. McIlvanney All the Colours 310: ‘Fuck this, fuck that. You’re worse than me.’ [...] ‘They’re only cuss words, mister’.
2012		R.A. Dickey Wherever I Wind Up 40: I cuss under my breath. Not loud, not a bad cussword, but an audible obscenity, no doubt.
2024		K. Noem No Going Back 45: Even eighty-something-year-old church ladies, who would have been greatly offended if I let a cuss word slip, overlooked his [...] colorful vocabulary.