Before the research conducted by Anthony McEnery and Zhonghua Xiao(2004), there has not been any systematic account of swear-words in English. It may be because a lack of well-annotated corpus resources. However, the creation of BNC, which is a balanced and richly annotated corpus, makes it possible to explore swearing from various sociolinguistic variables, such as age, gender and education level. Based on McEnery and Xiao's research, this article applies similar methods to another English word-DAMN, a typical swear-word which frequently occurs in BNC and also in everyday language use. This article will make full use of BNC to explore a detailed distribute pattern of DAMN within spoken registers, within written registers and across these two registers. Besides, the article will also try to find out the limitations of corpus methodology.
