Bitch (insult)

Bitch, literally meaning a female dog, is a slang for a person, commonly a woman, who is belligerent, unreasonable, malicious, a control freak, rudely intrusive or aggressive. When applied to a man, bitch is a derogatory term for a subordinate. Its original use as a vulgarism, documented to the fourteenth century, suggested high sexual desire in a woman, comparable to a dog in heat. The range of meanings has expanded in modern usage. In a feminist context, it can indicate a strong or assertive woman.

The word bitch is one of the most common curse words in the English language. According to Dr. Timothy Jay, there are "over 70 different taboo words" but 80 percent of the time only ten words are used, and the word bitch is included in this set of ten.

The term bitch comes from the 1150 word bicche, which was developed from the Old English word bicce. It also may have been derived from the Old Norse word bikkja for "female dog". The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term meaning "female dog" to around 1000 A.D.

It is believed that the definition of a female dog for the term bitch derived from the Greek goddess Artemis. As she is the goddess of the hunt, she was often portrayed with a pack of hunting dogs and sometimes transformed into an animal herself. She is free, vigorous, cold, impetuous, unsympathetic, beautiful.

As a derogatory term for women, it has been in use since the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Its earliest slang meaning mainly referred to sexual behavior, according to the English language historian Geoffrey Hughes:

The early applications were to a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat. Herein lies the original point of the powerful insult son of a bitch, found as biche sone ca. 1330 in Arthur and Merlin ... while in a spirited exchange in the Chester Play (ca. 1400) a character demands: "Whom callest thou queine, skabde bitch?" ("Who are you calling a whore, you miserable bitch?").

Bitch remained a strong insult through the nineteenth century. The entry in Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) reads :

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