A grawlix is a group of typographical symbols used in place of a swear word. It often appears in comics, cartoons, social media posts, and other writing that wants to suggest profanity without showing the actual word.
A familiar grawlix might look like @#$%!. There is no official set of symbols or required order. Writers commonly choose attention grabbing marks such as the at sign, number sign, dollar sign, percent sign, ampersand, and exclamation point.
American cartoonist Mort Walker coined the term in 1964 while creating a playful vocabulary for familiar cartoon techniques. He later included it in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana. The visual device itself was already being used in comic strips before Walker gave it a memorable name.
Context tells readers what a grawlix is doing. The symbols do not usually represent individual letters, and readers are not expected to decode them into one exact word.
- “Where is my @#$% phone?” clearly expresses frustration.
- “You broke the #@%& machine again!” suggests an angry outburst.
A grawlix can soften written profanity, create humor, or exaggerate a character’s anger. It differs from a redaction, which hides text that was originally present. A grawlix is deliberately written as a symbolic substitute from the beginning.