12 June 2020
Broad is a slang term for a woman. It is sexist and connotes that the woman in question is sexually promiscuous. This sense of the word appears in criminal slang in the early twentieth century. The metaphor underlying the sense is uncertain, although there is an early guess that is plausible.
The adjective broad, meaning wide, is from Proto-Germanic, and this standard sense can be found in Old English as brad. It, for instance, appears in Beowulf, lines 1545–47a, in the fight between Beowulf and Grendel’s Mother:
Ofsæt þa þone selegyst, ond hyre seax geteah
brad ond brunecg; wolde hire bearn wrecan
angan eaferan.(Then she straddled her hall-guest and drew her dagger, broad and bright-edged; she wanted to avenge her child, her only kin.)
The earliest use of broad as a noun meaning woman that I am aware of is by cartoonist Thomas A. “TAD” Dorgan in 1913. The use is cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but I have been unable to locate the exact source, and while the denotation of broad to mean woman is clear, the context and connotations are not clear from the brief citation:
I caught Harry using my phone yesterday and took the message myself—she was some broad too.
The word is defined and given an etymology the next year in Jackson and Hellyer’s 1914 Vocabulary of Criminal Slang:
BROAD, Noun
Current amongst genteel grafters chiefly. A female confederate; a female companion; a woman of loose morals. See “DONY,” “FLUZIE,” “MUFF.” Broad is derived from the far-fetched metaphor of "meal ticket," signifying a female provider for a pimp, from the fanciful correspondence of a meal ticket to a railroad or other ticket, which latter originally was exclusively used by "gonifs" to indicate "broad," or a conductor's hat check. Also a playing card from the deck of fifty-two. A "three-card monte man" is a "BROAD SPIELER"; "Tipping the broads” is riding on a purchased transportation ticket; "Beating the broads" is corrupting the conductor or other collecting functionaire of a transportation line.
The proposal that the use comes from broad meaning ticket is plausible, but unlikely. Even Jackson and Hellyer deem it “far-fetched.” It’s plausible because broad has been used to mean a playing card since the eighteenth century. From George Parker’s Life’s Painter, c. 1790:
Sharps. Men of a contrary nature. This term is applied to sharpers in general, who are continually looking out for flats [i.e., “men who are easily taken in”], in order to them upon the broads, that is cards, or in short, any thing else, from pitch and hustle in Moorfields, to the Pharo table at St. James’s.
A move from playing cards to tickets of various sorts is plausible, although we have little evidence for such use outside of Jackson and Hellyer’s dictionary. So, their record of the term’s use as such may be a local usage peculiar to Portland, Oregon or the Pacific Northwest more widely. (Hellyer was a police detective in Portland, and much of his dictionary is based on his experience.) It’s tempting to treat this origin as authoritative because it appears close to the term’s appearance in print. If it’s older, the thinking goes, it must be closer to what those who coined it thought. But the opposite is usually the case. Later explanations, particularly advanced by those who have studied the entire corpus of evidence, which is growing as more and more old texts are digitized, are more likely to yield better answers.
Another suggestion, again advanced without evidence, is that it a sexually promiscuous woman is broad-minded. A more plausible speculation, but again just a guess, is that women are labeled broad because their hips tend to be broader than those of men.
In short, we don’t really know why this particular use of broad came to be. There are likely to be earlier examples of use to be found. Unfortunately, broad is a difficult word to search for in digital texts. Separating this slang sense from all the other senses of the word is laborious and not easy to automate. Perhaps, as more early examples of use are found, a clear origin will emerge.
Sources:
Dictionary of Old English: A to I. University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. brad.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. broad n.2.
Jackson, Louis E. and C. R. Hellyer. A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang. 1914.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. broad, adj., n.1, and adv.
Parker, George. Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life, second edition. c. 1790. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).