Frak is a fictional version of "fuck," "shit" or "damn" first used (with the spelling "frack") in the original Battlestar Galactica series. It continues to be used throughout different versions of the franchise as an expletive.
There are other uses, however: companies have adopted it as the name for commercial products, notably a computer game. It has also appeared in several other television shows such as Veronica Mars.
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'Frak' is a fictional version of "fuck," "shit" or "damn" first used (with the spelling "frack") in the original Battlestar Galactica series. In the "re-imagined" version, and subsequently in Caprica, it appears with greater frequency and with the revised spelling "frak", as the producers wanted to make it a four-letter word.[1] In that framework it seems to function as a substitute for "fuck" in several different forms, as an interjection ("Frak!"), inquisitive idiom ("What the frak?"), verb ("You're not still frakking Dualla, are you?"), adjective ("Get your motherfrakking hands off me!"), adverb ("You frakking crazy idiot!"), a noun ("You miserable frak"), ("A good frak"), (to Starbuck "I guess a pity frak is out of the question") or in compound words ("What a clusterfrak."), ("Motherfrakker!"), or as almost every word in a sentence ("frak the frakking frakkers.").
"Frak!" was the title of a popular game released on the BBC Micro B and Acorn Electron, and later the Commodore 64. The game saw the user controlling a caveman called Trogg, who had to navigate various maze-like scenarios and dispose of various deadly obstacles with his yo-yo. When coming into contact with such an obstacle or falling a substantial distance, Trogg would cry "Frak!" (via a speech balloon that appeared over his head) before the user restarting the level.
"Frak" is used in the same sense as in Battlestar by characters in the early 21st century "Ciaphas Cain" series of Games Workshop Warhammer 40,000 novels by Sandy Mitchell, probably an expression from the character's unknown birth world.[2]
Fräck (spelled with the umlaut 'ä') is also the product name of a shaving mirror produced by IKEA, a multinational home products retailer.[3] Most IKEA product names are in Swedish, and fräck is the Swedish word for audacious, shameless or bold (while frack, without ä, would translate to tailcoat). In the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series, a mirror of this type is installed in the cabin of William Adama.[4]
The word is also a direct Battlestar Galactica reference in the Periphery song 'Frak the Gods'.
The word 'Frak' was also used by futuristic police officer John Cogan in "Back from the Future", an episode of 21 Jump Street first aired in 1990.