Geoffrey Hughes. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. M.E. Sharpe, 2006.
This ancient and enduring term is one of the few insulting epithets that has never lost its power, whether used in the older narrow sense of “prostitute” or more generally, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary of “an unchaste or lewd woman; a fornicatress or adulteress.” Other strong terms like bitch, bastard, and bugger have all acquired humorous, ironic, or jocular tones, but whore remains powerfully condemning. As the entry for prostitutes shows, numerous synonyms like harlot, concubine, strumpet, and quean have become part of the word-field, but most are now archaic. The emotive power of whore also explains the need for a steady supply of euphemisms, such as the modern escort and the more recent sex-worker (1982), styling the person neutrally as a labor unit. There are many archaic compounds, such as whoremonger and whoreson, as well as male forms such as he-whore. A recent development has been the extended use to anyone who sells out their principles, found in P.J. O’Rourke’s polemical title The Parliament of Whores (1991).
Although found in Anglo-Saxon, whore is recorded late in comparison with the related Germanic languages. The etymology is fascinating, since whore has cognate forms in Latin carus, “dear,” and Old Irish cara, “a friend.” It first appears in the form hore, subsequently huir, indicating the pronunciation “hoor” or “hooer,” which continued into the nineteenth century, and as the OED noted, “may be adopted … when we wish to soften the effect of a coarse word.” The spelling with wh– became current in the sixteenth century.
Surprisingly, the term occurs only once in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, but not in the Canterbury Tales, where the less critical concubine is used. The main concentrations in Shakespeare are, expectedly, in the tragic context of Othello (1604) and the cynical ambiance of Troilus and Cressida (1606). The translators of the King James Bible (1611) used the term copiously. The generalized sense is recorded from about 1200 in such graphic quotations as this from Layamon: “He slew Zabri … His hore binede and him abuven” (Genesis and Exodus, l. 4082). The abusive meanings refer to a concubine, kept mistress, or even a catamite. In this context an interesting legal repercussion is recorded in 1547: “Marioun Ray amerciat [fined] for trubling Agnes Hendersoun, calland [calling] her huir and theiff” (The Borough Records of Stirling I. 48). However, a judgment of 1703 (still cited in 1817) ruled that “Calling a married woman or a single one a whore is not actionable, because fornication or adultery are subjects of spiritual not temporal censures” (Selwyn, Law Nisi Prius II., 1160). In Troilus and Cressida the provocatively candid Fool Thersites refers to Patroclus as the “masculine whore” of Achilles (Vi 20), while in 1694, Sir Peter Motteux’s translation of Rabelais includes the ingenious coinage “he-whore” (Pantagruel v. 237).
During the bitter Reformation controversies, the Catholic Church was frequently stigmatized as the “Whore of Babylon.” William Tyndale, denouncing the “the greate baude the hore of Babylon,” was referring to the Pope (1530, in Practical Prelates). Two hundred years later Horace Walpole still mischievously alluded to the phrase, but used the contemporary euphemism w―. Whoredom became part of the vocabulary of religious abuse, referring to idolatry. Together with whoremonger and whoremaster, which meant “one who keeps or frequents with whores,” it was originally a powerful term of abuse before becoming generalized, especially in the cynical Restoration comedies, and finally obsolete.
Whoreson, dating from the fourteenth century, was originally a strong insult: “He despised the gretteste lordes …, and called Sir Robert Clare Earl of Gloucester, ‘Horeson'” (Layamon’s Brut, ca. 1400, I, 207). Being a loan translation of Anglo-Norman fitz a putain, “son of a whore,” it is first recorded in a literal and highly provocative sense. However, by the late fifteenth century it had clearly lost intensity, for in William Caxton’s Reynard (1481) there is a reference to “the false horeson the foxe” (xxi l. 53). Thomas Wilson’s authoritative Rhetoric (1553) gives this amusing and revealing instance: “The mother being merelye [merrily] disposed, wyll saye to her swete Sonne: Ah you little horeson” (79). This is clearly the equivalent of the modern familiar “Ah you little bastard.”
The grave digger in Hamlet (1604) refers to his dead friend Yorick affectionately as “a whoreson mad fellow” (V i 191), and in King Lear there is the amusing personal insult: “Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter” (II i 64). By the Restoration the term was clearly overused and dated: the revealingly titled Character of a Town Gallant (Anonymous 1675) noted: “He admires the Eloquence of Son of a Whore,… and therefore applyes it to everything, so that if his pipe be faulty … tis a Son of a Whore Pipe” (5).
In American English whore was previously avoided, notably by Noah Webster in his edition of the Bible (1833) and was forbidden by the Motion Picture Production Code (1930). H.L. Mencken discusses the taboo in “Forbidden Words” (1963, 360-61) The Black English variant form ho (pronounced to rhyme with “hoe”) is recorded from 1958 and has become widely used in the generalized sense of “a loose woman,” generating a number of compounds.