Porneia

Fornication is generally consensual sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other. When one of the partners to consensual sexual intercourse is a married person, it may be described as adultery.

For many people, the term carries an overtone of moral or religious disapproval, but 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 more judgment-neutral term like extramarital sex.

In the original Greek version of the New Testament, the Greek term porneia (πορνεία) (or its variants) is used 25 times.Porneia meant prostitution, a usage still in use today.

In the late 4th century, the Latin Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Greek texts, translated the term as fornicati, fornicatus, fornicata, and fornicatae. In 1611 King James Version, the first English translation of the Christian bible used the term fornication. Other translations have used terms such as whoredom, sexual immorality (eg., Matthew 19:9) or simply immorality.

In Latin, the term fornix means arch or vault. In Ancient Rome, prostitutes waited for their customers out of the rain under vaulted ceilings, and 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."

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