the.com/filth

Dirt with a moral opinion — grime that judges you back.

means Disgusting dirt or filthy matter, and by extension moral corruption, obscenity, or depravity.

from From Old English 'fylth,' built on the root 'ful' — the same root that gives us 'foul.' So filth has always been foulness turned into a noun, a cousin of 'filthy' and 'defile.' It's a Germanic word through and through, with relatives across the old Germanic languages, and it carried both the physical sense (muck, excrement) and the moral sense (corruption, obscenity) right from its earliest recorded use — the dirt and the disgust were never really separated.

origin
old english fulth, kin to foul
legal use
obscenity laws once called it that literally
range
covers mud, corruption, and dirty jokes equally
slang flip
british football fans use it as praise
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