30 September 2020 (Image added 19 February 2023)
Extract from Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270, showing the interlinear gloss of fulan horen & byccan (foul whores and bitches) for fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes)
The word bitch is used to refer to a female dog, and the word is also used as a derogatory term for a woman, and it is used in the idiomatic epithet son of a bitch and as a verb meaning to complain. It’s an old word, dating to Old English, but the practice of referring to women as dogs is much, much older than the English language itself.
The Old English bicce appears five times in the extant corpus. Two of these are simple glosses of the Latin canicula (female dog). Two others appear in a medical text:
Biccean meolc gif ðu gelome cilda toðreoman mid smyrest & æthrinest, butan sare hy wexað. Wearras & weartan onweg to donne, nim wulle & wæt mid biccean hlonde, wrið on þa weartan & on þa wearras.
(If you frequently smear and touch a child’s gums with bitch’s milk, the teeth grow without pain. To do away with corns and warts, take wool and wet it with bitch’s urine, bind it to the warts and corns.)
The fifth appearance of the word in the Old English corpus is an epithet for a woman. (One may quibble over whether this instance is Old English or Early Middle English, as it dates to the twelfth century.) The word appears in the manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, which contains a copy of Ælfric’s homily “Sermo ad Populum.” Ælfric wrote in the closing years of the tenth century, but a twelfth-century hand has emended the text in this manuscript. The text in this manuscript reads:
ða fulan forliras, and ða fulan horan and byccan
ðe acwellað heora cild ær þan ðe hit cuð beo mannum(the foul fornicators and the foul whores and bitches
who kill their children before they can become adults)
The words “fulan horan and byccan” (foul whores and bitches) replace “fracodan myltestran” (wicked harlots) in Ælfric’s original.
But the practice of referring to women as dogs didn’t start in the twelfth century, but rather at the very least a thousand years before that. In Act 5 of his play Curculio, Plautus (c.254–184 BCE) describes a fight between a man and a woman over a ring:
ut eum eriperet, manum arripuit mordicus.
vix foras me abripui atque effugi. apage istanc caniculam.(To get it away [from me], she seized my hand with her teeth. With difficulty I fled out of doors and escaped. Away with this bitch of yours.)
There are undoubtedly other such instances in various ancient languages. But while the derogatory use of bitch to refer to a woman may be ancient, in English, at least, it was rather uncommon until relatively recently. In American English, it was rarely heard before the 1920s, when its use suddenly exploded. The table here shows the word’s appearances in the Corpus of Historical American English in the first four decades of the twentieth century, broken down by sense: literal reference to a dog, reference to a woman, the phrase son of a bitch, and other uses (i.e., as a surname or as a general swear word).
Uses of the word bitch in American speech during the first four decades of the twentieth century (Source: COHA)
The phrase son of a bitch may literally be a derogatory reference to a woman, but as an idiom it often does not have that connotation and is used as a general term of abuse.
This surge in use of the insult corresponds with first-wave feminism and the women’s suffrage movement. As women started pushing for greater inclusion in public life, men started to tear them down.
The verb to bitch, meaning to complain, which comes from a metaphor of a nagging or complaining woman, makes a few appearances in eighteenth-century British speech. From Edward Ward’s 1745 A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster:
A Leaden-Hall Butcher would be bitching his Wife, for not only opening her Placket, but her Pocket-Apron to his Rogue of a Journeyman, and expensively treating the young strong back’d Rascal at the Ship Tavern, whilst himself was entering his Puppy at the Bear Garden.
And there is this from a letter by Edmund Burke of 9 May 1777. The speaker of the House of Commons, Fletcher Norton, gave a speech that some thought insulting to the king and objected to being entered into the record. But Burke, Charles Fox, and others supported Norton, and it was eventually entered.
Norton bitched a little at last; but though he would recede, Fox stuck to his motion for the honour of the House; and they were obliged to admit it.
The OED defines this as an early instance of to bitch with the sense of to hang back. But since there is another eighteenth century use of the sense of to complain, that would seem to have been Burke’s meaning, not a new sense of the word.
But these eighteenth-century uses are rare, and the verb doesn’t appear again until the twentieth century in the United States. It’s recorded by the journal American Speech in 1930 in a glossary of slang used at Colgate University:
Bitch: to become dissatisfied with something and complain about it. “He bitched about the course.”
The epithet son of a bitch, a way to insult someone’s lineage and in particular their mother, dates to the early seventeenth century and is first recorded in Jacobean theater. A variation on the insult appears in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2, in one of the more famous passages of Shakespearean insults:
Ste. What do’st thou know me for?
Kent. A Knaue, a Rascall, and eater of broken meates, a base proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy woosted-stocking knaue, a Lilly-liuered, action-taking, whoreson glasse-gazing super-seruiceable sinicall Rogue, one Trunke-inheriting slaue, one that would’st be a Baud in way of good seruice, and art nothing but the composition of a Knaue, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Sonne and Heire of a Mungrill Bitch, one whom I will beate into clamours whining, if thou deny’st the least siliable of they addition.
And the shorter, modern phrasing appears in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s play The Coxcomb, Act 2, Scene 1, which was published in 1647 but had been performed by 1610, although the existing version was heavily edited after the playwrights’ deaths, so the 1647 date is the earliest we can date the present-day phrasing:
They had no mothers, they are the sones of bitches.
So, bitch is one of those terms that existed at a low level of use for a very long time before a sudden change in politics or society catapulted it into the spotlight, in this case its rise is part of the backlash to feminism.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Sermo ad Populum.” Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. John C. Pope, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society (EETS), 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 436, lines 379–80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. Comedies and Tragedies. London: Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1647, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Burke, Edmund. Correspondence, vol. 2 of 4, Charles Fitzwilliam and Richard Bourke, eds. London: F. & J. Rivington, 1844, 157. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
de Vriend, H.J. The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus. Early English Text Society (EETS), 286. London: Oxford UP, 1984, 234–73.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. bicce.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bitch, n.1., bitch, v., sonofabitch, n.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. bicche, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bitch n.1., bitch, v.2; third edition, June 2017, s.v. son of a bitch, n. and int.
Russell, Jason Almus. “Colgate University Slang.” American Speech, 5.3, February 1930, 238. JSTOR.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. First Folio, 1623, Folger copy no. 68, 291.
Ward, Edward. A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster. London: Joseph Collier, 1745, 64. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Zhou, Li. “Use of the Word ‘Bitch’ Surged After Women’s Suffrage.” Vox.com, 19 August 2020.
Table: Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.
Image credit: Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.