Bloody  Bloody, as an adverb, is a commonly used expletive attributive in British English, Australian English, and a number of other Commonwealth nations. It has been used as an intensive since at least the 1670s. Considered respectable until about 1750, it was heavily tabooed during c. 1750–1920, considered equivalent to heavily obscene or profane speech. Public use continued to be seen as controversial until the 1960s, but since the later 20th century, the word has become a comparatively mild expletive or intensifier. In American English, the word is used almost exclusively in its literal sense and is seen by American audiences as a stereotypical marker of British English, without any significant obscene or profane connotation. Use of the adjective "bloody" as a profane intensifier predates the 18th century. Its ultimate origin is unclear, and several hypotheses have been suggested. It may be a direct loan of Dutch "bloote", (modern spelling blote) meaning "entire", "complete" or "pure", which was suggested by Ker (1837) to have been "transformed into "bloody", in the consequently absurd phrases of "bloody good", "bloody bad", "bloody thief", "bloody angry", etc., where it simply implies completely, entirely, purely, very, truly, and has no relation to either blood or murder, except by corruption of the word." The word "blood" in Dutch and German is used as part of minced oaths, in abbreviation of expressions referring to "God's blood", i.e. the Passion or the Eucharist. Ernest Weekley (1921) relates English usage to imitation of purely intensive use of Dutch "bloed" and German "Blut" in the early modern period. A popularly reported theory suggested euphemistic derivation from the phrase "by Our Lady". The contracted form "by'r Lady" is common in Shakespeare's plays around the turn of the 17th century, and Jonathan Swift about 100 years later writes both "it grows by'r Lady cold" and "it was bloody hot walking to-day" suggesting that "bloody" and "by'r Lady" had become exchangeable generic intensifiers. However, Eric Partridge (1933) describes the supposed derivation of "bloody" as a further contraction of "by'r lady" as "phonetically implausible". According to "Rawson's dictionary of Euphemisms" (1995), attempts to derive "bloody" from minced oaths for "by our lady" or "God's blood" are based on the attempt to explain the word's extraordinary shock power in the 18th to 19th centuries, but they disregard that the earliest records of the word as an intensifier in the 17th to early 18th century do not reflect any taboo or profanity.