occupy

Occupy is a verb with many shades of meaning, but these senses fall into two broad categories. One sense is that of keeping busy or being engaged, as in occupying one’s time; the other is to seize, to take possession of, as in occupying territory. English borrowed the verb from the Anglo-Norman French occupier or occuper, with a primary meaning of to seize or to hold, especially to hold an office. But the keep busy sense was also in use in the Anglo-Norman and in the Latin occupare, from which the French verb comes.

The first recorded English use of the verb is in the sense of to keep busy, to be engaged. It is from a translation of an English statute, 9 Edward II, Articuli Cleri, originally written in Latin and passed in 1316. The Middle English translation is from some time before 1325:

For þe procrastinacion of þe askinde, he ne sal noȝt for iugen him þat is occupied.

(For not responding to the complaint, those who are occupied shall not be judged.)

[This brief snippet is in both the OED and the MED. It is a Middle English translation of the law, which was originally in Latin. I cannot locate a copy of the source for the Middle English, so my translation is based on the larger context found in the Latin text. It is saying that, like archbishops and barons, clerks who are employed (occupied) in the Exchequer or in the king’s service are immune from prosecution for carrying out their inherent duties.]

By the end of the fourteenth century, the second meaning of occupy, to take possession of, to hold, is recorded in English use. People could occupy an office or title, a dwelling, or someone else’s land—often by force. This last has a rather unsavory connotation; the use of force to take someone’s land is generally not looked upon favorably. We recall the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, and during the recent war in Iraq, American politicians and generals took great pains to stress that the United States was not “occupying” Iraq. More recently, the Occupy movement, which started in 2011 to protest economic inequality and other social injustices, took its name from this sense of the word.

We see this second sense in Chaucer’s The Monk’s Tale, in a passage that retells the biblical verses of Daniel 5:24–31, in which Daniel interprets the writing on the wall:

“This hand was sent from God that on the wal
Wroot Mane, techel, phares, truste me;
Thy regne is doon; thou weyest noght at al.
Dyvyded is thy regne, and it shal be
To Medes and to Perses yeven,” quod he.
And thilke same nyght this kyng was slawe,
And Darius occupieth his degree,
Thogh he therto hadde neither right ne lawe.

(“This hand that on the wall wrote ‘Mane, techel, pares’ was sent by God, trust me. Your reign is done, you are of no account at all. Your kingdom is divided, and it shall be given to Medes and Persians,” he said. And that same night the king was slain, and Darius occupies his throne, though he had neither right nor law to do so.)

There is at least one subsense, however, that has faded from use. Starting the late fourteenth century, to occupy meant to have sexual intercourse. From an anonymous, fourteenth-century translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon:

Men of Lacedemonia provide for a batelle ageyne men of Micena, which fatigate and wery thro the compleyntes of theire wifes beenge at home, made a decre and ordinaunce that thei scholde occupye mony men, thenkenge the nowmbre of men to be encreasede by that.

(The men of Lacedaemonia preparing for war against the men of Mycenae, who fatigued and wearied from the complaints of their wives at home, made a decree and ordinance that they should occupy many men, thinking that this would increase the number of men.)

John Trevisa’s c. 1387 translation uses the word take, rather than occupy. Higden’s original Latin has uti (to use).

This use of occupy was usually not used to describe marital relations, but rather fornication, often in the context of prostitutes and concubines. John Florio’s 1598 Italian–English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, has this entry:

Fottisterii, baudie or vauting houses ... Also occupyers or baudie fellowes.

(Florio’s use of vauting is of etymological note in that a vaut or vault is an arched architectural structure, which is the same sense as the Latin fornix, which gives us fornicate and fornication. As far as I know, vaut did not have sexual connotation, but perhaps Florio’s use reflects a lost slang sense. Or he could just be engaging in wordplay based on the Latin, which does have that connection.)

This sexual sense is a more specific application of the more general sense of taking possession of, often with the implication of the use of force or rape. This English usage may have been influenced by the classical Latin occupare amplexu, meaning to seize with an embrace. This sexual sense of occupy survived as slang into the nineteenth century.

Sources:

9 Edward II, Articuli Cleri (1316). In Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1. London: Dawsons, 1963, 172. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2013–17, s.v. occupier1, v.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Monk’s Prologue and Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 7.2231–38. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. occupare, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Florio John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 137/1. Hathitrust Digital Archive.

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon, vol. 3. Anonymous translator. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. London: Longman, et al., 1871, 47. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 13 January 2025, s.v. occupien, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. occupy, v.