Fornication

Fornication is generally consensual sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other. The significance of sexual acts to which the term is applied varies between religions, societies and cultures. In modern usage, the term is often replaced with a value judgment term like extramarital sex.

Prostitutes in ancient Rome waited for their customers out of the rain under vaulted ceilings, and the Latin word for vaults, fornix, became a euphemism for brothels, and the Latin verb fornicare referred to a man visiting a brothel. The first recorded use in English is in the Cursor Mundi, c. 1300; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records a figurative use as well: "The forsaking of God for idols".

Fornicated as an adjective is still used in botany, meaning "arched" or "bending over" (as in a leaf). John Milton plays on the double meaning of the word in The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty (1642): "[She] gives up her body to a mercenary whordome under those fornicated [ar]ches which she cals Gods house."

The Greek term porneia (πορνεία), meaning "illicit sexual intercourse", was translated as "fornication" in the 1611 King James Version of the bible and has also been translated as whoredom, sexual immorality or simply immorality.

The Pauline epistles contain multiple condemnations of various forms of extramarital sex. The First Epistle to the Corinthians states "Flee from sexual immorality" and lists adulterers and "those who are sexually immoral"/practicing-fornicators in a list of "wrongdoers who... will not inherit the kingdom of God". First Corinthians and the Epistle to the Galatians also address fornication. The Apostolic Decree of the Council of Jerusalem also includes a prohibition of fornication.

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