The trend of self-censoring words like 'dead' and 'kill' appears to be relatively new, motivated by TikTok and YouTube algorithms, but spilling over into the general internet.
I agree, although I was referring to asterisks like de*d and k*ll (or censoring with black bars, or using emojis) - euphemisms of course have always been part of language evolution.
I chose unalive because i didn't know google trends allowed searching for asterisks. Appears it does. k*ll was apparently used even before tiktok but usage increased markedly around the same time as unalive appeared. Interestingly d*ad and r*pe don't follow this pattern. I am not sure it treats asterisks correctly, nor that google trends is the right tool to research this, given people searching for the word is only a poor indicator of its usage.
Sidenote, I wish all websites supported markdown properly and not a custom weird subset they found convenient.
