From Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson, 1987:
f*ck. Originally a quite acceptable word, f*ck was recorded in an English dictionary as early as John Florio's A World of Words (1598). The word doesn't drive from the police blotter entry "[booked] for unlawful carnal knowledge," as some people still believe. Our word of the act of sexual connection may remotely come from the latin for the same, futuere, but most probably is from the Old German ficken/fucken, "to strike or penetrate," which had the slang meaning "to copulate." As Partridge points out, the German word is almost certainly related to the Latin words for pugilist, puncture, and prick, through the root pug, which goes back to prehistoric times. Before f*ck came into English in the late 15th century - its first recorded use is in 1593 - swyve was the verb most commonly used for f*cking.
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