''Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words'' was first published in 1972 by

Playboy Press PLBY Group, Inc. is an American global media and lifestyle company founded by Hugh Hefner as Playboy Enterprises, Inc. to oversee the ''Playboy'' magazine and related assets. Its headquarters are in Los Angeles, California. The company is focus ...

and distributed by

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...

. Written by

Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American writer, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson ...

, it is sub-titled ''A liberated dictionary of improper English, containing over 700 uninhibited definitions of erotic and

scatological In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of faeces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (nutrition), diet (and thus habitat (ecology), where ...

terms''. The paperback edition's cover featured Mercy Rooney. It is a collection of 'items' from "Abbess" to "Zoophilia Erotica". The book contains the definition of words such as “dinge queen” (white homosexual who likes black people), “Beulah‐lover”, “chocolate lover”, “coal burner”, “midnight queen”, “negrera”, “Sheena”, ... Interviewed by ''Common Ground'', Vancouver (July 1999 Issue), Wilson talked about how he'd been tinkering with ''Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words,'' which he considered his best book—worst, that is, after the editors at ''Playboy'' did to the book "what the Roman Army did to the Sabine women". Claiming ignorance and inexperience, he had not objected at the time. If he had later rewritten the book the way he had wanted it to be the first time, he would have called it ''Robert Anton Wilson's Book of Black Magick and Curses''. He aimed to include all the

anthropological Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, wh ...

and

neurolinguistic Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neu ...

theorems that ''Playboy'' removed. Portions of this work are reprinted (reedited by Ali A Tuson with an added explanation of his problem with ''Playboy'') in his 1988 work ''Coincidance''.

References

1972 non-fiction books Books by Robert Anton Wilson English dictionaries Playboy Press books {{Ref-book-stub book-stub