ass / arse / donkey
An ass is domesticated equine, Equus asinus, otherwise known as a donkey. But an ass, or arse, can also refer to the human buttocks. These are two distinct words that happen to be, at least in American English, pronounced and spelled the same. Both can be traced with confidence to Old English, but earlier than that the origins of both are somewhat unclear.
The name of the animal is ultimately from the Latin asinus, although the exact route into Old English is uncertain. Donkeys were rare in early medieval Britain, so knowledge of the animal and its name probably chiefly came from written (Irish?) sources. The word may be a direct borrowing from Latin, although that has phonological problems. More likely it is borrowed from a Celtic language, which in turn would have taken it from Latin. Old Irish has assan, and Welsh, Old Cornish, and Middle Breton have asen. Any of these are possible. For its part, Latin probably borrowed it from a Central Asian language, which would give it a non-Indo-European root. The Mycenaean Greek o-no and the ancient Greek ὄνος (onos), which give us onager, also seem to be from a non-Indo-European source.
The Old English assa (weak masculine inflection) meant a donkey of either sex, and assen (strong feminine inflection) was used to refer to a female donkey. We see the word in the Old English translation of Genesis 12:16, about the Egyptians who were trying to buy Sarah from Abraham:
& Abram underfeng fela sceatta for hyre: he hæfde ða on orfe & on ðeowum, on oluendum & on asssum mycele æhta.
(And he [pharaoh] offered Abraham many treasures for her [Sarah]; he acquired then many possessions: cattle & servants, & camels & asses.)
Use of ass as a derogatory epithet for a person is almost as old as the name of the animal. From the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy:
Gif þu on hwilcum men ongitst þæt he bið gitsere and reafere, ne scealt ðu hine na hatan mon ac wulf; and þone reðan þe bið þweorteme ðu scealt hatan hund nalles mon; and þone leasan lytegan þu scealt hatan fox næs man; and þone ungemetlice modgan and yrsiendan þe to micelne andan hæfð þu scealt hatan leo næs man; and þone sænan þe bið swa slaw þu scealt hatan assa ma þonne man.
(If you see in some man that he is greedy and a robber, you must not call him a man but a wolf; and the fierce man who is quarrelsome you must call a dog not a man; and the false deceiver you must call a fox not a man; and the excessively proud and angry person who has too much malice, you must call a lion not a man; and the sluggish who is too slow [you] must call an ass rather than a man.)
(Actually, the translation of Boethius, created at the end of the ninth century, is about a century older than the translation of Genesis. These quotations are not intended to be the earliest, and logically the name of the animal had to come first.)
Arse, meaning the buttocks, is from a common Proto-Germanic root, cf. the German arsch and the Dutch aars. The Old English ears appears only once in the extant corpus, in a gloss of the Latin anus, but we also see the root used in compounds, again mainly in glosses and in medical texts, such as earsendu (arse-end, the buttocks), earsgang (arse-privy, a privy or fecal discharge), earslira (arse-flesh, the buttocks), and earsþyrel (arse-hole). These compounds are primarily also found in glosses; earsgang (fecal discharge) appears in medical texts.
The fact that ears only appears once in the corpus is unsurprising. The Old English texts we have today are not a representative sample of the language as a whole, with the texts that are preserved are those that monks and nuns deemed worthy of being copied and kept. The surviving corpus, therefore, overwhelming consists of limited range of topics, such as texts of religious significance, legal documents, historical chronicles, and a smattering of mostly religious poetry, none of which are likely to contain references to body parts. The Middle English ars or ers is much more common, probably a result of that corpus reflecting a wider range of writers and scribes. Consideration of the word as indecent or obscene starts in the Early Modern era and is fully in place by the eighteenth century.
The use of arse as a derogatory term for a person is unequivocally dated to the late nineteenth century, but there is an interesting single use of the word from c. 1785 in poet William Blake’s unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon. In the manuscript, Blake wrote “Ass * Arse” and then crossed that out, writing in “ass” again. The lines are a parenthetical aside to the reader, appearing after the introduction of a number of characters:
(If I have not presented you with every character in the piece
call me Ass * Arse) ass—
Michael Phillips, editor of the facsimile edition of the manuscript, notes:
Given the parenthetical address to the audience, the second instance, “Arse”, may have been intended as a pun on the Latin ars.
Ars means art, knowledge, skill. Personally, I think it looks more like Blake was initially unsure of which word to use, so he wrote both. Later he went back and chose ass, meaning a donkey. But what exactly Blake intended and why he changed his mind are matters of speculation.
Arse also has a long history of referring to the vulva and by extension a woman as an object of sexual conquest. We see this anatomical shift from back to front as early as the fourteenth century. Here’s an example from William Langland’s Piers Plowman (C-text):
For an hore of here ers-wynnynge may hardiloker tythe
Then an errant vserer,
(For a whore may more confidently tithe her arse-winnings than an errant usurer.)
Whether or not sex workers could tithe a portion of their earnings to the church was a matter of theological and popular debate at the time.
The non-equine ass is simply a variant of arse originally found in non-rhotic (i.e. r-dropping) dialects. The two forms are essentially synonymous in all senses. In the United States, ass became dominant form, even in rhotic dialects. As a result, ass is often considered to be the American form of the word, although in recent years ass has been making inroads into British English.
Donkey is a more recent development, coming into common use because of confusion between ass and arse and the reluctance to use ass in polite circles or to put it into print. It is of unknown origin, perhaps a hypocoristic form of the name Duncan (cf. jackass and jenny-ass). It was probably in dialectal or slang use for some time prior to seeing print, which happened in the late eighteenth century. It’s first appearance in print is in a slang dictionary, Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
DONKEY, donkey dick, a he, or jack ass, called donkey, perhaps from Spanish, don[-]like gravity of that animal, entitled also the king of Spain’s trum[p]eter.
From this slang use, donkey eventually moved into standard English.
Sources:
Blake, William. An Island in the Moon: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Michael Phillips, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987, 32–33, 73. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS Charles Fairfax Murray 31, fol. 2r.
Crawford, S. J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. Oxford University Press: London, Gen. 12:16, 116.
Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. assa, n., assen, n., ears, n.
Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine. The Old English Boethius, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 1.504 and 2.175.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. arse, n.
Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, s.v. donkey. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Langland, William. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text (c. 1388). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014, 6.305–06, 133.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. ars, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. ass, n., ass, n.2, arse, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. donkey, n., jenny, n.
Photo credit: unknown photographer, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
