Cunt () is a contemporary vulgar word for the vulva in its primary sense, and it is used in a variety of ways, including as a term of disparagement. It is often used as a disparaging and obscene term for a woman in the United States, an unpleasant or objectionable person (regardless of gender) in the United Kingdom and Ireland, or a contemptible man in Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, New Zealand and sometimes the United Kingdom, it can also be a neutral or positive term when used with a positive qualifier (e.g., "He's a good cunt"). The term has various derivative senses, including adjective and verb uses.
History The earliest known use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was as part of a placename: an Oxford street called Gropecunt Lane, , now by the name of Grove Passage or Magpie Lane. Use of the word as a term of abuse is relatively recent, dating from the late nineteenth century. The word was not considered vulgar in the Middle Ages, but became so during the seventeenth century, and it was omitted from dictionaries from the late eighteenth century until the 1960s.
Etymology
The etymology of cunt is a matter of debate, but most sources consider the word to have derived from a Germanic word (Proto-Germanic *kuntō, stem *kuntōn-), which appeared as in Old Norse. Scholars are uncertain of the origin of the Proto-Germanic form itself. There are cognates in most Germanic languages, most of which also have the same meaning as the English cunt, such as the Swedish, Faroese and Nynorsk ; West Frisian and Middle Low German ; another Middle Low German ; Middle High German (meaning ""); modern German ; Middle Dutch ; modern Dutch words (same meaning) and ("butt", "arse"); and perhaps Old English .
The etymology of the Proto-Germanic term is disputed. It may have arisen by Grimm's law operating on the Proto-Indo-European root "" seen in gonads, genital, gamete, genetics, gene, or the Proto-Indo-European root "" (, seen in gynaecology). Similarly, its use in England likely evolved from the Latin word cunnus ("vulva"), or one of its derivatives French con, Spanish coño, and Galician/Portuguese cona. Other Latin words related to cunnus are ("") and its derivative ("", (figurative) ""), leading to English words such as cuneiform (""). In Middle English, cunt appeared with many spellings, such as , and , which did not always reflect the actual pronunciation of the word.
The word, in its modern meaning, is attested in Middle English. Proverbs of Hendyng, a manuscript from some time before 1325, includes the advice:
Offensiveness Generally The word cunt is generally regarded in English-speaking countries as profanity and unsuitable for normal public discourse. It has been described as "the most heavily tabooed word of all English words", although John Ayto, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Slang, says "nigger" is more taboo.
Feminist perspectives
Some American feminists of the 1970s sought to eliminate disparaging terms for women, including "bitch" and "cunt". In the context of pornography, Catharine MacKinnon argued that use of the word acts to reinforce a dehumanisation of women by reducing them to mere body parts; and in 1979 Andrea Dworkin described the word as reducing women to "the one essential – 'cunt: our essence ... our offence'".
Despite criticisms, there is a movement among feminists that seeks to reclaim cunt not only as acceptable, but as an honorific, in much the same way that queer has been reappropriated by LGBT people and nigger has been by some African Americans. Proponents include artist Tee Corinne in The Cunt Coloring Book (1975); Eve Ensler in "Reclaiming Cunt" from The Vagina Monologues (1996); and Inga Muscio in her book, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (1998).
Germaine Greer, the feminist writer and professor of English who once published a magazine article entitled "Lady, Love Your Cunt" (anthologised in 1986),anthologized in Germaine Greer, The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, (1986) discussed the origins, usage and power of the word in the BBC series Balderdash and Piffle, explaining how her views had developed over time. In the 1970s she had "championed" the use of the word for the female genitalia, thinking it "shouldn't be abusive"; she rejected the "proper" word vagina, a Latin name meaning "sword-sheath" originally applied by male anatomists to all muscle coverings (see synovial sheath) – not just because it refers only to the internal canal but also because of the implication that the female body is "simply a receptacle for a weapon". But in 2006, referring to its use as a term of abuse, she said that, though used in some quarters as a term of affection, it had become "the most offensive insult one man could throw at another" and suggested that the word was "sacred", and "a word of immense power, to be used sparingly". Greer said in 2006 that cunt' is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock."
Usage: pre-twentieth century Cunt has been attested in its anatomical meaning since at least the 13th century. While Francis Grose's 1785 A Classical Dictionary of The Vulgar Tongue listed the word as "C**T: a nasty name for a nasty thing", (immediately following Cunny-thumbed) it did not appear in any major English dictionary from 1795 to 1961, when it was included in Webster's Third New International Dictionary with the comment "usu. considered obscene". Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1972, which cites the word as having been in use from 1230 in what was supposedly a London street name of "Gropecunte Lane". It was, however, also used before 1230, having been brought over by the Anglo-Saxons, originally not an obscenity but rather an ordinary name for the vulva or vagina. Gropecunt Lane was originally a street of prostitution, a red light district. It was normal in the Middle Ages for streets to be named after the goods available for sale therein, hence the prevalence in cities having a medieval history of names such as "Silver Street" and "Fish Street". In some locations, the former name has been bowdlerised, as in the City of York, to the more acceptable "Grape Lane".Baker, N. & Holt, R. (2000). "Towards a geography of sexual encounter: prostitution in English medieval towns", in L. Bevan: Indecent Exposure: Sexuality, Society and the Archaeological Record. Cruithne Press: Glasgow, pp. 187–98.
The somewhat similar word 'queynte' appears several times in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1390), in bawdy contexts, but since it is used openly, does not appear to have been considered obscene at that time. A notable use is from the "Miller's Tale": "Pryvely he caught her by the queynte." The Wife of Bath also uses this term, "For certeyn, olde dotard, by your leave/You shall have queynte right enough at eve .... What aileth you to grouche thus and groan?/Is it for ye would have my queynte alone?" In modernised versions of these passages the word "queynte" is usually translated simply as "cunt". However, in Chaucer's usage there seems to be an overlap between the words "cunt" and "quaint" (possibly derived from the Latin for "known"). "Quaint" was probably pronounced in Middle English in much the same way as "cunt". It is sometimes unclear whether the two words were thought of as distinct from one another. Elsewhere in Chaucer's work the word queynte seems to be used with meaning comparable to the modern "quaint" (curious or old-fashioned, but nevertheless appealing). This ambiguity was still being exploited by the 17th century; Andrew Marvell's ... then worms shall try / That long preserved virginity, / And your quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust in To His Coy Mistress depends on a pun on these two senses of "quaint".Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress". Norton Anthology of English Literature. Seventh Edition. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 1691–1692.
By Shakespeare's day, the word seems to have become obscene. Although Shakespeare does not use the word explicitly (or with derogatory meaning) in his plays, he still uses wordplay to sneak it in obliquely. In Act III, Scene 2, of Hamlet, as the castle's residents are settling in to watch the play-within-the-play, Hamlet asks his girlfriend Ophelia, "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" Ophelia replies, "No, my lord." Hamlet, feigning shock, says, "Do you think I meant country matters?" Then, to drive home the point that the accent is definitely on the first syllable of country, Shakespeare has Hamlet say, "That's a fair thought, to lie between maids' legs."Partridge, Eric, Shakespeare's Bawdy, Routledge, London, 2001, p. 111. In Twelfth Night (Act II, Scene V) the puritanical Malvolio believes he recognises his employer's handwriting in an anonymous letter, commenting "There be her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts: and thus makes she her great Ps", unwittingly punning on "cunt" and "piss", and while it has also been argued that the slang term "cut" is intended, Pauline Kiernan writes that Shakespeare ridicules "prissy puritanical party-poopers" by having "a Puritan spell out the word 'cunt' on a public stage". A related scene occurs in Henry V: when Katherine is learning English, she is appalled at the gros, et impudique words "foot" and "gown", which her teacher has mispronounced as coun. It is usually argued that Shakespeare intends to suggest that she has misheard "foot" as foutre (French, "fuck") and "coun" as con (French "cunt", also used to mean "idiot").Partridge, Eric, Shakespeare's Bawdy, Routledge, London, 2001, p. 110.
Similarly, John Donne alludes to the obscene meaning of the word without being explicit in his poem The Good-Morrow, referring to sucking on "country pleasures". The 1675 Restoration comedy The Country Wife also features such word play, even in its title.
By the 17th century, a softer form of the word, "cunny", came into use. A well-known use of this derivation can be found in the 25 October 1668 entry of the diary of Samuel Pepys. He was discovered having an affair with Deborah Willet: he wrote that his wife "coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl con [with] my hand sub [under] su [her] coats; and endeed I was with my main [hand] in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also ...."
Cunny was probably derived from a pun on coney, meaning "rabbit", rather as pussy is connected to the same term for a cat. (Philip Massinger (1583–1640): "A pox upon your Christian cockatrices! They cry, like poulterers' wives, 'No money, no coney.'")Ship, Joseph Twadell. The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, JHU Press, 1984, p. 129. Because of this slang use as a synonym for a taboo term, the word "coney", when it was used in its original sense to refer to rabbits, came to be pronounced as (rhymes with "phoney"), instead of the original (rhymes with "honey"). Eventually, the taboo association led to the word "coney" becoming deprecated entirely and replaced by the word "rabbit".Carney, Edward, A survey of English spelling, Routledge, 1994, p. 469.Morton, Mark, Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities, Insomniac Press, 2004, p. 251.Allan & Burridge, Forbidden Words, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 242.
Robert Burns (1759–1796) used the word in his Merry Muses of Caledonia, a collection of bawdy verses which he kept to himself and were not publicly available until the mid-1960s. In "Yon, Yon, Yon, Lassie", this couplet appears: "For ilka birss upon her cunt, Was worth a ryal ransom" ("For every hair upon her cunt was worth a royal ransom").
Usage: modern
General
As a term of abuse