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Expletives are words that take the place and function of other words. They are part of a language's grammar, though not all languages have expletives. They serve to take the place of subjects or to introduce the sentence. Consider this example:
He was wrong. Not only is English not Latin, but It is not a pronoun in the example sentence; it is an expletive (also called preparatory it or prep it). It takes the place of the verb's non-existent (or perhaps hearsay) subject and serves no other purpose.
It is worth noting that Bishop Lowth did not condemn sentences that use there as an expletive, even though in certain contexts, there is a pronoun that refers to an already-identified place.
In a sentence such as "There are ten desks here," the word order is expletive-predicate-subject-adverbial phrase. The subject, ten desks, is after the obvious predicate, are. Here is the adverbial phrase. There is no object (a word in the objective case) in the sentence. What is there doing there? It is an expletive. It introduces the sentence, "introducing this sentence to you".
The term expletive is also used to refer to "bad language". In the Watergate tape transcripts, the phrase expletive deleted refers to an obscene or otherwise offensive term. Expletives in this sense are adjectives, nouns or, most commonly, interjections, rather than the grammatical expletives discussed above. However, they often share the characteristics of lacking meaning and grammatical function.
"Bad Language"