The article examines the peculiarities of the Ukrainian idiomatic curses, i.e. special phraseological verbal formulas, which are essential structural elements of the emotional utterance in Ukrainian, having a very colorful emotional and expressive charge and performing various pragmatic functions in speech. Such stable speech formulas – curses – are very frequent in Ukrainian everyday spoken language; having [a relatively] stable syntactic model: “Щоб + to whom (3. Dative) + something happened”, such units are very variable in their lexical composition, emotional and evaluative semantic content. Examination of such stable forms of curses in terms of their degree of expression and pragmatics is the main goal of this paper.