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Bullshit (also bullshite or bullcrap) is a common English language expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive. It is mostly a slang term and a profanity which means "nonsense", especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as Deception, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection, or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings. A person who excels at communicating nonsense on a given subject is sometimes referred to as a "bullshit artist" instead of a "liar".
In philosophy and psychology of cognition, the term "bullshit" is sometimes used to specifically refer to statements produced without particular concern for truth, clarity, or meaning, distinguishing "bullshit" from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth. "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit", Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, Jonathan A. Fugelsang. Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563. In business and management, guidance for comprehending, recognizing, acting on and preventing bullshit, are proposed for stifling the production and spread of this form of misrepresentation in the workplace, media and society. Within organizations bullshitting is considered to be a social practice that people engage with to become part of a speech community, to get things done in that community, and to reinforce their identity. Research has also produced the Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale that reveals three factors of organizational bullshit (regard for truth, the boss, and bullshit language) that can be used to gauge perceptions of the extent of organizational bullshit that exists in a workplace.
The word is generally used in a depreciatory sense, but it may imply a measure of respect for language skills or frivolity, among various other benign usages. In philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, among others, analyzed the concept of bullshit as related to, but distinct from, lie; the liar tells untruth, the bullshitter aims to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true—it may be.
As an exclamation, "Bullshit!" conveys a measure of dissatisfaction with something or someone, but this usage need not be a comment on the truth of the matter.
Although there is no confirmed etymological connection, these older meanings are synonymous with the modern expression "bull", generally considered and used as a contraction of "bullshit".
Another proposal, according to the lexicographer Eric Partridge, is that the term was popularized by the Australian and New Zealand troops from about 1916 arriving at the front during World War I. Partridge claims that the British commanding officers placed emphasis on bull; that is, attention to appearances, even when it was a hindrance to waging war. The Diggers allegedly ridiculed the British by calling it bull.
Frankfurt connects this analysis of bullshit with Ludwig Wittgenstein's disdain of "non-sense" talk and with the popular concept of a "bull session", in which speakers may try out unusual views without commitment. He fixes the blame for the prevalence of "bullshit" in modern society upon the (at that time) growing influence of postmodernism and anti-realism in academia as well as situations in which people are expected to speak or have opinions without appropriate knowledge of the subject matter.
In his 2006 follow-up book, On Truth, Frankfurt clarified and updated his definition of bullshitters:
Several political commentators have noted that Frankfurt's concept of bullshit provides insights into political campaigns. Gerald Cohen, in "Deeper into Bullshit", contrasted the kind of "bullshit" Frankfurt describes with a type he referred to as "unclarifiable unclarity" (i.e., nonsensical discourse presented as coherent and sincere but is incapable of being meaningful). Cohen points out that this sort of bullshit can be produced either accidentally or deliberately, but is especially prevalent in academia (what he calls "academic bullshit"). According to Cohen, a sincere person might be disposed to produce a large amount of nonsense unintentionally or be deceived by and innocently repeat a piece of bullshit without intent to deceive others. However, he defined "aim-bullshitters" as those who intentionally produce "unclarifiable unclarity" (i.e., Cohen-bullshit) in situations "when they have reason to want what they say to be unintelligible, for example, in order to impress, or in order to give spurious support to a claim" (p. 133).Cohen, G. A. (2002). "Deeper into Bullshit". Originally appeared in Buss and Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Reprinted in Hardcastle and Reich, Bullshit and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), .
Cohen gives the example of Alan Sokal's Sokal Affair as a piece of deliberate bullshit (i.e., "aim-bullshitting"). Indeed, Sokal's aim in creating it was to show that the "postmodernist" editors who accepted his paper for publication could not distinguish nonsense from sense, and thereby by implication that their field was "bullshit".
Another application of Frankfurt's concept of bullshit is with regards to generative AI. It has been argued that the outputs from ChatGPT and similar chatbots should be regarded as bullshit, particularly when it "hallucinates", because the process by which large language models decide what text to output primarily prioritizes appearing superficially similar to meaningful, human-generated text, rather than the accuracy of any information contained therein, thereby producing confident but false information. In 2025, researchers proposed a "bullshit index" and a "bullshit taxonomy" to quantify the degree of disregard for truth in large language models.
University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom and professor Jevin West began a college course on "Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World". They then launched the Calling Bullshit website and published a book with the same title.
Further research from Wake Forest University psychologists found evidence to support Frankfurt's notion that a person is more likely to engage in bullshitting when they feel a social pressure to provide an opinion and perceive that they will be given a social "pass" to get away with it. Indeed, some have theorized that social media offers a prime environment for bullshitting as it combines the social pressure to offer one's opinions on a wide variety of topics along with an anonymity that arguably provides a social "pass". According to researchers from Queen’s University in Belfast (2008): "along with a pervasive and balkanized social media ecosystem and high internet immersion, public life provides abundant opportunities to bullshit and lie on a scale we could have scarcely credited 30 years ago".
More recently, researchers have identified a type of Dunning–Kruger effect for bullshit receptivity called the "bullshit blind spot". The researchers found that those who were the worst at detecting bullshit were not only grossly overconfident in their BS detection abilities but also believed that they were better at detecting it than the average person (i.e., they have a bullshit blind spot). Conversely, those who were the best at detecting bullshit were not only underconfident in their abilities, they also believed they were somewhat worse at detecting it than the average person. The researchers referred to this underconfidence bias among the high performers as "bullshit blindsight".
Given that much of the early scientific work on bullshit focused on those more likely to fall for it (i.e., the "bullshittees"), some researchers have turned their attention to examining those more likely to produce it (i.e., the "bullshitters"). For example, in 2021, a research team at the University of Waterloo developed the "Bullshitting Frequency Scale", which measures two types of bullshitting: "persuasive" and "evasive". They defined "persuasive bullshitting" as a rhetorical strategy intended to impress, persuade, or otherwise fit in with others by bullshitting about one's knowledge, ideas, attitudes, skills, or competence. "Evasive bullshitting" refers to an evasive rhetorical strategy in which one provides "non-relevant truths" in response to inquiries when direct answers could result in reputational harm for oneself or others.
Building on these findings, the researchers also tested the familiar adage that “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter”. To do so, they explored associations between scores on the Bullshitting Frequency Scale and performance on measures of receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit, pseudoscientific bullshit, and fake news. They found that higher scores of "persuasive bullshitting" positively predicted scores for all three types of "bullshit receptivity". In other words, those who are most likely to persuasively bullshit others are in turn more likely to believe persuasive bullshit, suggesting that you can indeed bullshit a bullshitter after all.
In the Boston accent of the Boston, Massachusetts area, "bullshit" can be used as an adjective to communicate that one is angry or upset, for example, "I was wicked bullshit after someone parked in my spot."
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