DYKYMWTM? — "Do You Kiss Your Mother With That Mouth?" — is the Great Internet Swearword Project. It combines some simple voting algorithms with the power of the internet, with the aim of finding the greatest swear word in the world. Visit the top words page to track our progress towards this goal, or contribute by submitting your own favourite words or by voting on the words already in our database.
DYKYM uses a simplification of a Condorcet method to find the "most preferred" members in a given set; in our case, the set of swear words. By calculating the ratio of (votes won/(votes won + votes lost)), each word can be given a score between zero and one. It is then a simple matter to sort the set of words by this score value in order to obtain the most preferred word, the second-most preferred word, and so on. This isn't a true Condorcet method, as it fails to address certain problems such as circular ambiguity in the result set. However, it seems to work well enough for our purposes, and has the added benefit of being very fast to calculate over the many thousands of words in our database.