Squick

What is squick?

Squick is a scene word for something you recoil from without having a judgment about it: not my thing, fine for you. A squick describes a reaction in your body, not disapproval of the other person and not an agreement between you. Everyday English has no single word for it.

Where the word squick comes from

From two newsgroups in the same year, with two meanings that have nothing to do with each other.

The oldest source I’ve been able to read is in alt.tasteless, on 22 April 1991: Matthew Harelick asks there what squicking actually is, and the answer he gets describes a gruesome, made-up act whose name, according to the person answering, comes from the sound. Five months later the word turns up in alt.sex.bondage, in the meaning the scene has kept using, and entirely in passing: on 18 September 1991 someone in a thread about homemade nipple clamps writes that a nuclear battery in such a clamp is “squick in my book”. Not a fetish, then, but nuclear power.

English-language Wiktionary derives the word from squ- as in squirm and -ick as in ick, and writes that it arose in alt.sex.bondage and became popular in alt.tasteless. That order sits awkwardly with the dating of the quotes in that same article, because the alt.tasteless source is the oldest. What is certain about it: it is imitative of sound, and it has stayed jargon. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the largest slang dictionary of English, has zero entries for squick and zero for squicky. While kink turns up sixteen.

Why the scene has a separate word for disgust

Because “yuck” and “that’s not allowed” sound the same in plain speech, and in a conversation about play they mean something completely different.

If you say diapers make you gag, you are saying something about your stomach. If you say diapers cross a line, you are saying something about the people who do use them. Squick covers only the first, and that makes the conversation easier for both: you can say what you recoil from without it sounding like a sermon, and the other person does not have to defend something they are not doing wrong.

The flip side sits right beside it. A squick holds nothing back. It is not an agreement, it is on no list, and no one is bound by it. If you want something not to happen during an evening, you have to name it as a hard limit or a no-go; call it a squick, and you have only told someone how you feel about it. That difference regularly costs people an unpleasant moment.

Where this fits on this site

My own no-go list on my BDSM profile opens literally with the sentence “no judgment, it is just not for me”. That is exactly what squick means, only written down as an agreement instead of felt as a feeling. What you make of something you do not have to justify; if you want to know how such a conversation goes beforehand, that is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Squicking ?. Thread in the newsgroup alt.tasteless, 22 April 1991, read in the Usenet archive of Google Groups. First-hand source for the oldest occurrence of the word: Matthew Harelick asks what squicking is, and Geoff Miller’s answer describes a gruesome made-up act whose “name comes from the resulting sound”. That is not the meaning the scene uses.
• Do-it-yourself nipple clamps. Thread in the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage, 18 September 1991, read in the Usenet archive of Google Groups. First-hand source for the oldest occurrence of the meaning on this page: an anonymous poster writes about a proposed nipple clamp with a nuclear battery that “nuclear = squick in my book”. The word appears without explanation, so it was already in use at that point.
• squick, v.. Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, Oxford University Press, published 2 March 2023. Gives that the largest historical dictionary of English added the word only in 2023, and only as a verb: there is no entry squick, n. The entry itself is behind a paywall; its existence, edition, and publication date were checked through the Crossref registration of the DOI.
• squick. English-language Wiktionary. Gives the sound-imitative derivation from squ- (as in squirm) and -ick, the origin claim about alt.sex.bondage and alt.tasteless, the dated list of quotes along which I traced the two threads above, and the usage note that the word serves precisely to distinguish what is harmful or indecent from what is merely off-putting. A dictionary anyone can edit, used here for the derivation and as an index to the sources, not as authority on the origin.
• Basic search: squick. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, digital edition. Gives a negative result: zero hits for squick and zero for squicky, while the same search service gives sixteen entries for kink and thirty-nine for squee. So the word has stayed jargon and never made it into general slang lexicography.

Related terms

• Hard limit. What a squick becomes the moment you name it as an agreement.
• No-go. The same in plain language, and the word people mostly use for it.
• Limit. The form in which a dislike per act lands on a list.
• Kinklist. The form on which the difference between “rather not” and “never” becomes visible.
• Consent. The permission a squick on its own says nothing about.
• Vanilla. The other word the scene uses to talk about preferences without judgment.