Is word "crapy' considered a swear? [closed]

It's not a swear word but it's certainly slang and so in a discussion where a minimum of formalism is expected it will not do. It wil not be considered impolite or rude but educated people used to a more select language are liable to find your choice of words a poor one.


It is probably true that most people wouldn't consider "crappy" to be a swearword, but older dictionaries labelled it as vulgar (and a commenter has pointed out that some still do: https://www.lexico.com/definition/crappy ). The Cambridge Dictionary online labels it as "offensive" ( https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/crappy ). I think that relatively few people will be offended by it and virtually no one will be seriously offended. All the same, it is advisable for non-native speakers to err on the side of caution.

The UK TV regulator Ofcom, in its 2016 report entitled "Ofcom's 2016 research on offensive language", labels "crap" as a "mild swearword". (It doesn't make clear whether the same judgement applies to "crappy", the derived adjective.) It explains that this puts it in the same category as "God", "Jesus Christ", "damn", "bugger", "arse", "git", "minger" and "sod off", and that this means most respondents are happy for it to be broadcast before 9 pm and feel that these words are often said in front of children anyway.

In 2010, a report by the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission (What Not To Swear) found that only 14% of respondents felt the word "crap" was unsuitable for a drama programme broadcast at 8:30 pm (a reduction from more than 20% when the question was posed five years earlier).

Finally, this is slightly dated, but back in 2000, a joint report (Delete Expletives) by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority and other regulators found that only 5% of respondents surveyed regarded "crap" as a "very severe" swearword, 15% as "severe", 48% as "quite mild", and 32% as "not swearing".