[EliAndrewC]

The example in the OP (fuck) was so common until the early 1800s because of the typographic convention to substitute an f for an s. In other words, the word "suck" was being written as "fuck", which is why the word appeared so often until the early 1800s.

[orls]

You can see the changeover quite clearly by comparing the two against each other: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fuck%2C+suck&...

If we assume all pre-1800ish mentions of 'fuck' are definitely meant to be 'suck', it still features much more prominently in the corpus beforehand than after.

Any ideas why that might be? E.g. certain types of text that were more common before that era, or other (less, er, 'suck'y) types of text that came after, 'diluting' the corpus?

[tseabrooks]

Any background on the origin of this typesetting convention? I'd like to know the whys and whatfors...

[EliAndrewC]

The technical term for this is a "long s", which Wikipedia describes at great length: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

[edge17]

thanks, that was incredibly fascinating and enlightening, especially the examples.

The long s survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz based the character on the Latin word summa ("sum"), which he wrote ſumma. This use first appeared publicly in his paper De Geometria, published in Acta Eruditorum of June 1686,[2] but he had been using it in private manuscripts at least since 1675.[3]

[jcr]

If you change the bounds to include the 1700's, the prevalence of the term is more pronounced (if you pardon the pun).