The PhD dissertation investigates the development of ribaldry from its onset till the present day and attempts to trace the causes that caused the various changes in its expression and usage. The author suggests that Ribaldry has evolved and transformed both lexically and functionally through the years. For instance, the founding of Christianity as the official Greek religion banned ribaldry; however, it managed to survive through folklore traditions such as the carnival. Nowadays, ribaldry has spread, following the general norms of word production, in a way that stereotypical forms of offensive phrases are encountered in daily speech, something that is confirmed in the statistical data presented in this study. In fact, it constitutes a way of common linguistic and social behavior, occurring mainly in oral production.