slut / slut-shaming
In today’s parlance, slut is a derogatory term for a woman who freely exercises her sexual agency. The word dates to the early fifteenth century and is of unknown origin. There are similar words in other Germanic languages, but their relationship to each other is unclear.
It is often said that the present-day meaning is a later development, and that slut originally referred to a slovenly, dirty, or unkempt woman. While this is technically true based on the earliest known citations of use, too much can be read into this evidence. The promiscuous sense follows hot on the heels of the slovenly sense, and when dealing with medieval manuscripts, a gap of a decade or more in the surviving texts is often not a significant difference.
We see the slovenly woman sense of slut in Thomas Hoccleve’s poem Litera Cupidinis, written in 1402, in which the poet claims he can make even the harshest critic fall in love with a slovenly woman:
But mawgre hem that blamen wommen most,
such is the force of myn impressyon,
that sodenly I felle can hir bost,
and al hir wrong ymagynacion;
yt shal not ben in her elleccion,
the foulest slutte of all a tovne refuse,
yf that my lyst for al that they can muse;
(Yet those who blame women the most, such is the force of my impressions, that suddenly I can cast down their boast, and all their wrong ideas; it shall not be in their power to choose, to reject the foulest slut in all the town, if it [is] my desire that it be all they can think about.)
But only ten years later, c. 1412, the same poet associates slut with prostitution. From Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes:
Demostenes his handës onës putte
In a wommannës bosom iapyyngly,
Of facë faire, but of hir body a slutte:
“With yow to delë,” seide he, “what schal I
Yow yeuë?” “xl pens,” quod sche, soothly.
He seydë nay, so dere he byë nolde
A thyng for which þat him repentë schulde.
(Demosthenes once playfully put his hands on a woman’s bosom, her face fair, but her body that of a slut; “To deal with you,” said he, “what shall I give you?” “Forty pence,” she said assuredly. He said no; so dear a thing he could not buy for which he would have to repent.)
Given that relatively few manuscripts from the period survive and that large gaps in the linguistic record are common, it is probably more accurate to say both senses of slut arose at about the same time, in the opening years of the fifteenth century.
The slovenly sense persisted in the language, but by the twentieth century it was largely overwhelmed by the sexual sense.
In the twenty-first century, we see slut starting to be reclaimed and the practice of criticizing women for exercising their sexual agency coming under fire. Slut-shaming was thus coined. The following post on Usenet from 16 April 2004 is the earliest example of slut-shaming found in the Oxford English Dictionary, although the word is not yet a compound, as the quotation marks denote. It’s a good example of the development of the word, even if the overall message expressed is a bit bonkers; not every teenager wants to engage in group sex:
Every teenager of both sexes secretly wants gangbangs, and the only boys who are afraid of them are those who are terrified that they will lose some solitary monogamous proprietary sexual access they wouldn't have because their penis is too small, or girls who have been brainwashed with the antisexual mindless “slut” shaming, or the lie that sexual giving leads to them being stuck with chidlren [sic] and no support, which is entirely only a political failure of the society.
And a few years later, on 22 September 2007, we see the verb to slut-shame emerge, again from Usenet:
Yeah. I so fucking hate moos who slut-shame other women and never once consider that men are perfectly capable of keeping their dicks in their pants when they want to.
Sources:
Hoccleve, Thomas. “Litera Cupidinis.” In Hoccleve’s Works. I. The Minor Poems. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 61. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892, lines 232–238, 82. Archive.org.
———. “The Regement of Princes.” In Hoccleve’s Works. III. The Regement of Princes. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 72. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897, lines 3767–73, 136. Archive.org.
Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. slutte, n.
Miz Daisy Cutter. “Re: FAB: WAH! Grandparents Ignore the G-kids.” Usenet: alt.support.childfree. 22 September 2007. https://groups.google.com/g/alt.support.childfree/c/zi3DaCOOkF4/m/eK09JYINNloJ
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v. slut, n., slut, adj., slut, v., slut-shaming, n., slut-shame, v.
Walz, R. Steve. “Dogging, the Latest Craze in Europe, next YOUR BACK YARD!” Usenet: alt.parenting.solutions, 16 April 2004. https://groups.google.com/g/alt.parenting.solutions/c/mx75gr1vrIQ/m/oGCKoF7gx88J
Image credit: MGM, 1926. The Scarlet Letter, Victor Sjöström, dir. IMDB.com. Public domain image.