Language in the United Kingdom
The words used for fornication, adultery and infidelity, where they come from and how their meaning shifted.
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Where does the word 'fornication' come from?
Fornication means consensual sex between two people who are not married to each other. The word entered English around 1300 through Old French from Late Latin fornicatio, built on fornix, an arch or vault. Roman writers used fornix for a brothel, reportedly because prostitutes solicited under arches. It appears repeatedly in the King James Bible of 1611.
View the topic →Fornication or adultery? Two words that are often confused
Fornication is consensual sex between two people who are not married to each other; adultery is sex between a married person and someone other than their spouse. Both words reached English around 1300 via Old French. The King James Bible lists them side by side, and English law long treated adultery more seriously, notably as a ground for divorce.
View the topic →Why did unmarried couples 'live in sin', and who still says it?
'Living in sin' means living together as a couple without being married. The phrase is recorded from 1838, while 'cohabitation' in this sense goes back to the 1540s. Dictionaries now label it old-fashioned: in England and Wales, about nine in ten couples who married in 2022 had already lived together.
View the topic →Wedlock, illegitimate, bastard: the words for children of unmarried parents
'Born out of wedlock' means born to parents who are not married to each other. 'Wedlock' comes from Old English wedlac, a pledge or marriage vow, and 'out of wedlock' is recorded around 1400. 'Illegitimate' dates from the 1530s, and 'bastard' from the early 13th century. The Family Law Reform Act 1987 removed most legal distinctions in England and Wales.
View the topic →From 'continency' to 'abstinence': the English vocabulary of sexual restraint
In traditional Christian usage, chastity means sexual purity suited to one's state of life, inside or outside marriage, while continence means self-restraint, including abstaining from sex. Both entered English in the Middle Ages. The 1662 Prayer Book says marriage helps those without 'the gift of continency', and the Catholic Catechism still treats chastity as a virtue.
View the topic →How Older Scots wrote about fornication, from Lyndsay to the kirk session
Older Scots used 'fornicatioun', with spellings such as 'fornicacioun', recorded by the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue from about 1490. David Lyndsay paired it with adultery around 1552. After the Reformation, kirk session records, which survive from 1569 at the National Records of Scotland, recorded such cases in their own Scots vocabulary.
View the topic →Where does the 'shotgun wedding' come from?
A shotgun wedding is a marriage arranged in haste because the bride is pregnant. The phrase is American: Etymonline records it from 1903, and Merriam-Webster dates the pregnancy sense to 1929. The practice is far older; historians have found that a high proportion of English brides from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century were already pregnant.
View the topic →Why English had so many words for 'loose' women and so few for men
These insults have surprising origins. 'Harlot' first meant a male vagabond around 1200 and took on its sexual sense by the fourteenth century, later reinforced by Bible translators. 'Strumpet' dates from the mid-fourteenth century, origin uncertain. 'Hussy' is a worn-down 'housewife' that turned derogatory by the mid-1700s. The main male counterpart, 'rake', dates from the 1650s.
View the topic →How 'lewd' changed from 'not a priest' to 'indecent'
'Lewd' comes from Old English læwede, meaning lay or not of the clergy, probably related to 'lay'. By the early thirteenth century it meant unlearned, and by the late fourteenth century coarse or lustful. English law later adopted the moral sense: Blackstone's Commentaries list 'open and notorious lewdness' among offences against God and religion.
View the topic →Did a medieval king really license sex? The truth about a viral acronym
No. The claim that a common English swear word is an acronym of 'fornication under consent of the king' is a modern myth. Etymonline traces such acronym stories online to 1995, while the word itself is recorded by the early sixteenth century and probably has Germanic roots. No English king ever issued licences for sex.
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