Faggot

Faggot, often shortened to fag, is one of the most charged anti-gay slurs in English, aimed chiefly at gay men and sometimes at other LGBTQ+ people. The first recorded use as a pejorative appears in a 1914 American slang vocabulary. The word doubles as an old term for a bundle of sticks used as fuel, which has fed a popular claim that it comes from burning gay men at the stake. Historians treat that story as folk etymology; the actual path into a slur is not fully settled. Some gay men have reclaimed the word with humor and defiance, using it among themselves. That reclamation does not remove its power to wound when it comes from outsiders.