This study confirms earlier research findings that multilinguals’ emotion-laden words hold more emotional weight in the first language(s) than in later learned languages (Dewaele, 2013). An inquiry of data gathered via an online questionnaire from 1159 native English (L1) users and 1165 English foreign language (LX) users disclosed, startlingly, that LX users overvalued the odiousness of most words, except for the most abusive one in the list. It is proposed that when coming across these words in a classroom, learners are cautioned to remember their power. They thus commonly overrate the power they founder to discern exactly themselves. LX users were notably less sure about the precise meaning of most words compared to the L1 users and mentioned more repeated use of relatively less insulting words while the L1 users described higher use of more taboo words. Variation among LX users was linked to having lived (or not) in English-speaking settings, to learning context and to self-observed level of expertise in English LX.