31 July 2020
Cunt is, of course, a word for the female genitalia and is used as an epithet. Its use as an epithet for a woman is extremely offensive, rivaling the N-word in that respect. Other uses, such as its literal use or the British use as an epithet for a man, are not quite so offensive, but no sense of the word could be considered polite by any stretch of the imagination. And as in the case of many such offensive words, their taboo nature makes discovery of the origin difficult. The word is simply not recorded all that often until the twentieth century.
There was probably an Old English noun *cunte meaning cleft or split, and perhaps also used to refer to the female genitalia, but if that word existed, it does not appear in the extant manuscripts. The phrase cuntan heale does appear in three surviving charters as features marking out property boundaries. The exact meaning of the phrase is uncertain but is likely something along the lines of cleft valley/hollow. (The phrase can be found by searching the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, but the word does not appear in the dictionary proper because the editors classified the phrase as a toponym, which the dictionary does not include by policy.) For example, there is this from an eleventh century forgery of a 900 C.E. grant of land from King Edward of Wessex-Mercia to the Abbey of New Minster in Winchester (Birch 596):
Of þam hwitan treowe on ðæt norð healde treow. Of ðam norð healdan treowe to cuntan heale. Of cuntan heale on ðone lytlan wyll.
(From the white tree to the tree bent to the north. From the tree bent to the north to the cleft hollow. From the cleft hollow to the little spring.)
And this from 960 C.E. grant of land to Brithelm, Bishop of Winchester by King Edgar (Birch 1054)
of ðære gearn windan fæt to stybban snade ðer wær ða twegen wegas tolicgað. þonon to cuntan heale. of þan heale to wifeles stigele.
(From there wind a basket of yarn to the cut stump where the roads run in two directions. then on to the cleft hollow. from the hollow to the weevil’s stile.)
Many of the other early appearances are also topographical. There is, for example, a 1221 reference to a Cuntelowe (cleft hill) in Warwickshire and a 1246 reference to Kuntecliue (cleft valley) in Lancashire. The word has cognates in many Germanic languages. It is often suggested that it shares the Proto-Indo-European root (s)keu- root with the Latin cunnus, meaning the female pudenda, and this may be the case, but if so, the addition of the / t / in the Germanic forms cannot be explained.
Some of the thirteenth century toponyms may be Danish in origin, rather than reflecting a native English form. There are also several street names which would appear to reference genitalia: Gropecuntelane (1223) in London and c.1230 in Oxfordshire.
But some of the appearances are personal names, although almost certainly jocular nicknames rather than proper names. There is Godewin Clawecuncte (1066), Simon Sitbithecunte (1167), Gunoka Cunteles (1219), John Fillecunt (1246), Robert Clevecunt (1302), and Bele Wydecunthe (1328).
As a stand-alone word, its earliest recorded appearance is in the version of The Proverbs of Hendyng contained in an early fourteenth-century manuscript:
Þe maide þat ȝevit hirsilf alle
Oþir to fre man, oþir to þralle,
Ar ringe be set an hande,
And pleiit with þe croke and wiþ þe balle,
And mekit gret þat erst was smalle,
Þe wedding got to sconde.
“Ȝeve þi cunte to cunni[n]g,
And crave affetir wedding.”(The maiden that gives herself completely
Either to a free man, or to a slave,
Before a ring is set on a hand,
And plays with the staff and with the ball,
And makes great that which before was small,
Goes to the wedding in disgrace.
“Give your cunt over to wisdom,
And desire after the wedding.”
Alternatively, by eliminating the comma the final two lines could read “Give your cunt over to [carnal] knowledge and lust only after the wedding.”
And you thought the European Middle Ages were just about knights, dragons, and God.
Use of the word as an epithet for a woman, carrying the connotation of promiscuity, dates to the seventeenth century. It appears in the entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary for 1 July 1663:
After dinner we fell in talking, Sir J. Mennes and Mr. Batten and I—Mr. Batten telling us of a late triall of Sir Charles Sydly the other day, before my Lord Chief Justice Foster and the whole Bench—for his debauchery a little while since at Oxford Kates; coming in open day into the Balcone and showed his nakedness—acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture and, as it were, from thence preaching a Mountebanke sermon from that pulpitt, saying that there he hath to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him—a thousand people standing underneath to see and hear him.
Many editions of Pepys’s Diary bowdlerize the word to women, an excellent example of one the problems historical linguists and lexicographers have in researching words like this one.
Sources:
The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix.
Birch, Walter de Gray. Cartularium Saxonicum, vols. 2 and 3 of 3. London: Whiting, 1887–93, Birch 596, 2:246 and Birch 1054, 3:273. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2009.
Latham, Robert and William Matthews, eds. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 4 of 11. London: HarperCollins, 1971, 209. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. cunte n., gropen v.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. cunt, n.
Varnhagen, H. “Zu Mittelenglischen Gedichten, 11, Ze Den Sprichwörten Hending’s.” Anglia, vol. 4, 1881, 190. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.1.1, fol. 479v