Colored version of an illustration of the Whore of Babylon that appeared in Martin Luther’s 1534 translation of the Bible
22 March 2023
Whore is an old word, and its core meaning, that of a prostitute, has remained unchanged from its Old English origin, although it has acquired a few supplementary senses along the way. The Old English hore is inherited from a Proto-Germanic root, and the word has cognates throughout the Germanic languages. Its Proto-Indo-European forbear is *ka, which carried a sense of desire, the same root that gives us caress, charity, cherish, and Kamasutra.
The Old English hore appears as a gloss to Aldhelm’s prose De virginitate (Regarding Virgins) in a passage about the fourth-century Christian martyr Daria. She had been a Vestal Virgin who converted to Christianity and was subsequently forced to live as a prostitute because under Roman law virgins could not be executed. In telling the tale in the opening years of the eighth century, Aldhelm writes “ista ad prostibula scortorum et meretricum contubernia truditur” (She is driven to the brothels of prostitutes and the concubinage of whores). Much later, an Old English hand has glossed the word meretricum (of prostitutes/courtesans) as horena
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)
By the twelfth century, whore had acquired another, more general sense of a sexually promiscuous woman and was used as a term of abuse. It appears in another gloss, this time in a manuscript of homilies by Ælfric of Eynsham, where Ælfric’s original, late tenth-century fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes) is glossed with fulan horan & byccan (foul whores & bitches). The context here is not one of sex work, so whore is not to be taken literally. The word miltestre (prostitute) would disappear from the language by the end of the twelfth century, so the glossator was probably substituting a term that would be more familiar to the sermon’s audience and adding the editorial bitch for emphasis. (This instance is also the first known use of bitch as a term of abuse for a woman, cf. bitch)
Whore would also acquire a sense of something generally sinful or idolatrous, most famously in the phrase Whore of Babylon. This sense appears in a Wycliffite translation of Revelation 17:1 from c. 1384:
And oon of the seuene aungels cam, that hadde seuene viols: and spake with me, seide, come thou; I schal schewe to thee the dampnacioun of the greet hoore that sitteth on many watris.
Again, the Latin Vulgate has meretrices in this this passage. The original Greek is πόρνης (pórnis, prostitute).
The verb to whore makes a single appearance in the fourteenth century in the text of the Ancrene Riwle, a manual for anchoresses, where it is used to mean to commit adultery, with a metaphor of being unfaithful to Christ. But it does not appear again in the extant literature until the mid sixteenth century, when it becomes firmly established.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Sermo ad populum in octavis Pentecosten dicendus” (Sermon to the People on the Octaves of Pentecost). In John C. Pope, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society 259, London: Oxford UP, 1967, 436. Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270.
Aldhelm. De virginitate. In Rudolf Ehwald, ed. Aldhelmi Opera. Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH Auct. Ant. 15). Berlin: Weidmannos, 1919, 279–80. Digital MGH.
Dictionary of Old English, A to I, 2018, s.v. hore, n.
The English Hexapla: Exhibiting the Six Important English Translations of the New Testament Scriptures. London: Samuel Bagster, 1848(?), 1246. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v., hor(e, n.2, miltestre, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v., whore, n., whore v.
Image credits:
Whore of Babylon: Workshop of Lucas Cranach, 1534. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.