What Does ‘Fubar’ Mean?

Netflix recently released season 2 of FUBAR, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and Monica Barbaro play a couple of CIA operatives who also happen to be father and daughter. The two navigate personal relationships and high-stakes missions simultaneously—not exactly a how-to for achieving work-life balance.

The series takes its title from a military acronym dating back to World War II. Here’s what fubar stands for, how it’s been used over the decades, and more.

1. What Does Fubar Stand For?
2. Fubar Hits Print
3. More “Military Screw-Up Acronyms”
4. Other Definitions of Fubar

What Does Fubar Stand For?

Fubar stands for “fouled up beyond all recognition,” where a stronger f-word is sometimes substituted for fouled. It’s an adjective that World War II soldiers coined to mean “thoroughly confused, disordered, damaged or ruined,” in Merriam-Webster’s words. Like scuba, radar, and other acronyms that became part of the lexicon, fubar is now often written in lowercase.

Fubar Hits Print

The term’s earliest known citation is from a January 1944 issue of Yank, the Army Weekly, a U.S. military magazine published during World War II. The article in question features diary excerpts that Corporal Larry McManus wrote about the Battle of Makin—a clash between Allied and Japanese forces at Makin, an atoll in the Gilbert Islands, in November 1943.

Among the American troops was the so-called “FUBAR Squadron,” which kept assisting different branches of the military without being formally claimed by any of them. McManus described one of the “Fubars,” Sergeant J.C. Hart, as clad in a “khaki Army garrison cap, Navy blue dungaree pants and a green twill jacket bearing the letters ‘USMC.’ ”

“We were with the Army Air Forces when we went to Virginia a couple of months ago for training in air-ground liaison,” Hart told McManus. “Then we went to San Diego and were attached to the Navy for duty. We went broke in a hurry. The Navy wouldn’t pay us; said we belonged to the army. The Army claimed we were sailors.” Eventually, the Fubars headed to Alaska with the Marines and then got sent to Makin for air-ground liaison. One Fubar lieutenant theorized that they were probably all listed as AWOL. “Maybe our records will catch up with us someday,” he said.

It’s not clear whether fubar was coined for this squadron in particular and later caught on as broader military slang; certainly the Fubars got around enough for that to be possible. But it’s also possible that the term already existed and seemed especially fitting for such a motley crew. After all, fubar was far from the only term of its kind.

More “Military Screw-Up Acronyms”

World War II was a golden age for “military screw-up acronyms,” as Paul Dickson described them in War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War. It also gave us the most classic one: snafu, for “situation normal, all fouled up.” The term captures “the common soldier’s laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of [their] superiors,” per the Oxford English Dictionary.

In an article for Medium, Jack Shepherd delved into a number of lesser-known military screw-up acronyms from Dickson’s book. Peruse some of them below (and note that every foul can be replaced with f***).

Other Definitions of Fubar

Fubar isn’t just an adjective. You can use it as a verb meaning “to make a mistake.” According to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, other definitions include the following:

• “Extremely unhappy”
• “Very unattractive”
• “Very drunk”
• “Out of luck”
• “Exhausted”

Twentieth-century college kids deserve a lot of the credit for expanding the term’s usage beyond military-coded disorder and damage. In the “very drunk” sense, it’s even been abbreviated as foob. Basically, fubar has become a multipurpose synonym for f***ed up (and to f*** up).

Discover More Military Slang: