A Linguist Explains the Historical Origins of the Word “Bitch”
Believe it or not, it’s related to the Hindi word for “cannabis” and the Icelandic word for “old horse”.
“Whom callest thou queine, skabde bitch?” (“Who are you calling a whore, you miserable bitch?”) — Chester Mystery Plays
The first recorded instance of the word “bitch” used in the English language in a less-than-flattering manner was ironically enough, from a cycle of Christian plays dating back to the 1400s called the Chester Mystery Plays.
However, “bitch” meaning “female dog” is unsurprisingly one of the oldest words in the English language. Spelled “bicce” or “bicge”, it was found in Old English texts dating back to the Anglo-Saxon period over a thousand years ago. Through linguistics we can trace its origins back even further, to the very beginning of the languages of Europe.
So where did the word “bitch” come from?
In order to track down its colourful history, we first have to make a trip to Russia and the Ukraine, and then take a detour to India before heading back to Western Europe.
The Indo-European languages
Let’s take a closer look at the red zone on the map to the left. It covers modern-day Southern Russia, the Ukraine and even part Kazakhstan. About six thousand years ago bands of chariot-riding, horse-breeding nomads began storming out of the plains of this zone. They spread outwards in all directions and within a millennium or so, their descendants had taken over large swaths of Europe, with some even riding all the way to India.
The yellow zone is the current 21st Century range of the areas where their descendants eventually settled. (That long yellow strip cutting across Siberia into the Far East is this writer’s feeble and probably less-than-accurate attempt to illustrate the current range where Russian is spoken after its quick spread in that part of the world within the last couple of centuries)
Linguists call the nomads’ reconstructed language (for they had no writing and kept no written records) Proto-Indo-European, after Europe and India. We may never know what they called themselves, but we do know the descendants of their language — English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Welsh, Gaelic, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Czech and many others — in other words, every single language spoken in Europe today except for Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Turkish.
Not only that, but take a good look at the large yellow area on the bottom half of the map. Languages from as far as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern India and Bangladesh also descend from Proto-Indo -European.
Historical Linguistics
There is a branch of linguistics called historical linguistics, dedicated to the study of how languages change over time as well as reconstructing extinct languages by comparing their modern descendants.
By carefully studying and comparing related words in the various daughter languages, historical linguists can piece together how the direct ancestor must have sounded like.
We thus know that the ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European had a word that probably sounded like “bheg-”. It meant “to smash” or “to break”.
As the nomads travelled further away to colonise new lands, their language quickly began to change. “Bheg-” began to evolve into other distinct new forms with a wide range of closely-related meanings.
A distant Indian cousin
In Northern India, one branch of the Indo-European languages evolved into Sanskrit — the ancient liturgical language of Hinduism— before eventually becoming Hindi , Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and other modern-day Indian languages.
Here, “bheg-” would eventually evolve into the Hindi “bhang”, meaning “cannabis”. How did this come about?
Originally meaning “to smash” or “to break”, the Hindi word “bhang” refers to a paste ground from cannabis leaves using a mortar and pestle. The smashing action involved in making it is how it got its name. In India, “bhang” was regarded as sacred and was traditionally mixed into various foods and drinks, although this is now illegal in many Indian cities!
The Germanic connection
Far away from India, in ancient Germany and Northern Europe, “bheg-” would evolve into “bikjaną” meaning “attack”, “stab”, “thrust” or “hack”. The Anglo-Saxons would later transform this word into “bicce” or “bicge” and eventually into the modern “bitch”. Perhaps in Old England attack dogs were primarily female?
“Bikjaną” was also the root of the Old Norse “bikkja” — “plunge into water”. Modern Icelandic would retain this word with a major shift in meaning — in Iceland today, “bikkja” now means “old horse” or “nag”!
The same root also ended up as “bicker” in English, although in this case it was likely borrowed via Dutch.
Notice a pattern? The old root “bheg-” had quite a few violent and aggressive connotations!
From “female dog” to sexual slur to grave insult
Throughout the High Middle Ages “bicce” or “bicge” would gradually evolve into “bitch” but remained a chaste word with little negative connotation. At least until the 14th Century when it suddenly became common to liken the behaviour of a woman of loose morals with the behaviour of a female dog in heat. Hence the sting of a nasty insult like “son of a bitch” (or “biche sone” during the Middle Ages) — a man’s mother was compared to a female dog in heat because she was so promiscuous that no one knew who his father was. “Bitch” was first and foremost a sexual slur and was meant to demean a person’s parentage and lineage.
By the early 19th Century “bitch” had become much more familiar to us 21st-Century readers. In Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue, “bitch” was defined as:
“…the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billinsgate or St. Giles’s answer — “I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch.”
Billinsgate (modern Billingsgate) was the site of a famous fish market and the fishmongers and fishwives there were notorious for their foul language. Meanwhile, St. Giles was known for its slums and general rough living conditions — hence its association with vulgarity.
“Bitch” had by the Regency period become firmly established as one of the worst insults directed towards women.
Hemingway’s bitch goddesses of the early 20th Century
50 years before Elton John shocked the world with his hit single “The Bitch is Back”, Ernest Hemingway had already invented the phrase “bitch goddess”, a term he first used sometime during the 1920s to describe the predatory, emancipated, ball-busting women characters in his novels.
A Hemingway bitch goddess was beautiful, sensual, sexually-liberated, powerful, fearless, domineering and possibly bisexual. It was also between the years 1915 and 1930 that the word “bitch” began to truly develop its modern sense: an unreasonable, aggressive, obnoxious and belligerent woman.
Spurred by two main factors — Hemingway and a few other provocative writers of that era and more importantly, the suffragette movement — “bitch” really took off once women won the right to vote. Many men were beginning to feel threatened by women’s new-found freedoms and not unsurprisingly, insults specifically aimed at women became all the more common.
In Idabel Williams’s 1934 book, Hell Cat, a female character was dismissed as (horrors!) both a bitch and a feminist.
“He’s the mayor, isn’t he? He’s the most important man in town, isn’t he? And married to that — that bitch!” “Lula!” “I don’t care, I’ll call her that to her face, and worse. I’ll call her a — a feminist!”
The 21st Century and beyond
Over the last few decades, “bitch” has begun to lose her bite. Society is growing accustomed to seeing women in positions of power; aggression and ambition in women is gradually becoming more acceptable; “bitch” is being reclaimed by women artistes and activists as a symbol of empowerment. Interestingly, “bitch” nowadays can also refer to men. It can even be used as a term of endearment between women.
Perhaps the shamans of the ancient nomad tribes of Southern Russia and the Ukraine had immense prophetic powers. Did they know that their word for “to smash” or “to break” would 6000 years later, transform into everything from “female dog” to “promiscuous woman” to “obnoxious person”? Could they have imagined that their distant descendants would later use this very word to smash stereotypes?
References
[1]: Francis Grose. (1811). Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5402/5402.txt
[3]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/son%20of%20a%20bitch
[4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/meet-the-new-bitch/386246/
[5]: https://www.vox.com/21365241/19th-amendment-womens-suffrage-backlash