Zounds

This quintessentially British oath, now archaic, is a euphemistic abbreviation of the exclamation God’s wounds! The full form of the oath was common in the sixteenth century and was said to be the favorite of Queen Elizabeth (Montagu 1973, 139). Although zounds is first recorded from 1600, it is one of many such forms in which the name of God was excised in response to Puritan pressures and legislation against profanity on the stage. This resulted in equally strange forms like ‘sbody for God’s body, ‘snails for God’s nails , and many others, covered in the entries for God and minced oaths. Other variants of zounds are zownes, zoones, zons, dzowns, zownds, zwounds, zauns, zoons , and dswounds . These variations show that people were more used to hearing than writing the form and that the original serious significance of the oath was steadily lost, so that the forms became simple empty exclamations. As early as 1698 the Restoration dramatist George Farquhar has the ironic observation in a piece of dialogue showing that the pronunciation had become simply a social distinction: “Zoons is only used by the disbanded [disgraced] Officers and Bullies [prostitutes’ protectors]: but Zauns is the Beaux [fashionable dandy’s] pronunciation” ( Love in a Bottle II ii). His contemporary John Dryden has the verbal sense: “When he loses upon the Square [gambling] he comes home zoundzing and blooding” ( The Kind Keeper , IV i 39).

In his eccentric novel Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), Laurence Sterne builds up mock suspense around “a word of all others in the dictionary the last in that place to be expected—a word I am ashamed to write—yet must be written—must be read—illegal—uncanonical…. In short, I’ll tell it in the next chapter.” This follows immediately:

                                        CHAP. XXVII

ZOUNDS cried Phutatorius, partly to himself—and yet high enough to be heard—

In Sterne’s typically playful fashion, the offending word is printed, but not truly uttered. The last instance recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1883. Perhaps the history of this word, like so much religious swearing, shows a fall from grace.