Tahmineh Tayebi is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, UK. Her research interests lie at the intersection of pragmatics, (im)politeness theory, corpus linguistics and forensic linguistics. She specialises in online offensive language, abuse and hate speech, with a particular focus on how language is used to cause harm and the broader legal and social implications of such communication. Vahid Parvaresh is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. His research focuses on language aggression, hate speech and impoliteness. His work is rooted in pragmatics, with a particular emphasis on how meaning is both shaped by and shapes what is said, alongside its social, moral and contextual foundations.

• Introduction; 1. Setting the scene: the dynamics of online offensive language; 2. Understanding offence; 3. Data and methodological considerations; 4. Navigating the landscape of offensive discourse; 5. Semantic domains of offensive language; 6. Patterns of offensive language usage; 7. Less explicitly offensive language; 8. Creativity and offence; Conclusion.

'What a pleasure to read a book that combines deft theoretical discussion with rigorous empirical work, and wraps it all up in prose that is a model of clarity! If you want to know about offensive language online (but with many reverberations well beyond that), this is compulsory reading.' Jonathan Culpeper, Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University