Women say F***
What the ---
An academic study has discovered that women now use the F-word more in their daily lives than men.

The survey, which was conducted by Lancaster University and the Cambridge University Press, questioned 376 volunteers who submitted recordings of up to three hours of their daily conversations.

And after amassing around 10 million words researchers concluded that women have become champs of the swearing stakes.

Data from the 1990s suggested men used the F-word 1,000 times per million words and their female counterparts just 167.

However over the past two decades women's use of the F-word has increased by more than 500 per cent.

As of 2014 women use the word 546 times per million words whereas men use it 540 times.

Women are also ten times as likely as men to say 's***', according to the new survey which was sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council.

In the early 1990s they said 's***' four times more than men but now that figure has doubled.

Lead researcher with the Economic and Social Research Council Professor Tony McEnery said that foul mouthed men and equality between the sexes are some of the key reasons behind the stark rise in use of profanity by the fairer sex.

On the F-word McEnery said: 'It looks like there were a set of men who said it a lot in the Nineties, and they influenced the women to do it, and then it leveled down.'

He said: 'As equality drives on, the idea that there is male and female language, that there are things which men and women should or should not say, is going to be eroded. Gentlemanly behaviour and ladylike language is becoming something of the past'

McEnery also noted that a new range of swear words, such as 'f****wit, 'f***tard and 'abso-bloody-lutely' had emerged and swearing is more acceptable than it was in the 1990s.

Although a number of homophobic and racist taunts have disappeared in the past few decades, McEnery confirmed.

'This is the first time in the history of the human race that we have been able to study changes in speech over a period of 20 years,' he said.

'These data sets are very rare. The British are the first to achieve this, to see how English has changed over the years.'

The full results of the survey will not be released until 2018.