AN ESSENTIAL PHRASEBOOK · THE ONLY ONE YOU REALLY NEED

Fart-
Ography: How the World Says Fart

🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇯🇵 🇧🇷 🇰🇷 🇮🇳 🇳🇬 🇳🇿
Scroll to begin
ℹ️ About📖 All languages✅ Review queue✍️ Submit a word🗺️ World map
104 of 104 stops
Europe
Eastern Europe · Central Asia
Middle East
East Asia
South & Southeast Asia
The Americas
Africa & Pacific
Southern & Eastern Europe
Caucasus & Central Asia
Southeast Asia
Pacific
Middle East & North Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Latin America
South Asia
East & Southeast Asia
Japan · Korea (Return Visits)
Linguistic Essays
Celtic & Iberian Fringe
Baltic States
The Balkans & Caucasus
Central & South Asia
Pacific & Arctic
Caribbean & Africa
Highlands & Invented Tongues

The Fartographic Method

Fartography is silly.

The research isn’t.

Languages are messy. Words change between countries, cities, generations and families. A textbook translation may be technically correct while sounding completely ridiculous to a native speaker.

So we don’t just ask, “What is the translation of fart?”

We ask:

What do people actually say?

Where possible, Fartography checks words and expressions with native speakers, dictionaries and linguistic sources, records regional differences, and distinguishes between formal language, slang, children’s words and expressions.

If we get something wrong, please tell us.

Fartography is, like language itself, a work in progress.

🇿🇦
poep
Stop 56
South Africa
Afrikaans
poep
/poop/
IPA /puəp/
🗣️ Everyday
Translation
A fart. In Afrikaans, poep is also the word for 'bum' or 'backside.' Doing double duty.
In a Sentence
Wie het gepoep?
"Who farted?"
💨 What people actually say
'n Poep laat — 'to let a fart.'
👶 The kid word
poepie — the diminutive, entirely innocent.
🤬 The rude version
windgat — 'wind hole,' meaning a show-off.
🎩 The polite version
winde or gasvorming.
🗺️ Regional variations
Note the trap: in Dutch, poep means excrement. In Afrikaans it means fart. Same word, different continent, very different sentence.
📖 Literally speaking
windgat = 'wind hole.'
🧐 Fartology
The Dutch/Afrikaans poep split is one of the cleanest examples of a word drifting during colonial separation.
⚠️ Use with caution
Never assume Dutch and Afrikaans agree here. They do not.
Cultural Note
Afrikaans developed from 17th-century Dutch brought to the Cape Colony, absorbing vocabulary from Malay, Portuguese, Khoekhoe, and African languages over 350 years. It is the youngest language in this book.
Dutch origins, African evolution. Sounds unmistakably like what it means.