Where did the word gay come from
It’s Pride Month and one of the most colourful words in the English language – with more makeovers than Madonna and more dramatic life stories than Liza Minnelli – is the word ‘gay’!
Like every hero, ‘gay’ has an origin story, but even today, scholars are in disagreement over the precise journey it took to contact the level of fame (or infamy) it commands nowadays. So, let’s piece together the history of this flashy one-syllable and acquire about the unreal historic events that shaped it into one of the most celebrated yet misunderstood three-letter words in the English language.
‘Gay’ was Germanic before it decided to go all French and fancy
The prevailing theory is that ‘gay’ came from Old Germanic, originally sounding fancy ‘gahi’, which meant ‘fast’ or ‘quick.’ ‘Gahi’ eventually became ‘jäh’ in new German, meaning ‘abrupt’, ‘sudden’, ‘steep’ or ‘sheer’. Pretty fitting for a synonyms with so many sudden changes in meaning over the centuries.
From there, it somehow ended up being borrowed by
Today I found out how ‘gay’ came to mean ‘homosexual’.
The synonyms “gay” seems to have its origins around the 12th century in England, derived from the Old French word ‘gai’, which in turn was probably derived from a Germanic word, though that isn’t completely known. The word’s original meaning meant something to the effect of “joyful”, “carefree”, “full of mirth”, or “bright and showy”.
However, around the early parts of the 17th century, the word began to be associated with immorality. By the mid 17th century, according to an Oxford dictionary definition at the time, the definition of the word had changed to mean “addicted to pleasures and dissipations. Often euphemistically: Of loose and immoral life”. This is an extension of one of the original meanings of “carefree”, meaning more or less uninhibited.
Fast-forward to the 19th century and the word gay referred to a woman who was a prostitute and a homosexual man was someone who slept with a lot of women (ironically enough), often prostitutes. Also at this time, the statement “gay it” meant t
How ‘gay’ got its rainbow: What once meant merry is now a badge of identity for homosexuals
On Thursday, as the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality, reading down the controversial British-era section 377 of the penal code, Mumbai-based Arnab Nandy took to social media to express his pleasure, as many across the country and the world were doing. “I am so Gay today…” he wrote in a coming-out send that has since gone viral. But while Nandy’s option of word was bang on that day, how did a word that had originally meant light-hearted, carefree or cheerful, become paired with a society whose life has been often been anything but?
The Oxford English dictionary traces the history of the word ‘gay’ to the French word Gai. Merriam Webster takes it further back to a Germanic start “akin to the Old High German Gahi” that meant “quick or sudden”. According to both dictionaries, in English the use of ‘gay’ to signify happy, excited, merry, carefree or radiant started in the Middle English period that stretches between the 12th and the 16th century.
All For An Identity
While some books and websites on the history of the global lesbian movement claim the word gay was used as
The History of the Pos 'Gay' and other Queerwords
Lesbians may have a longer linguistic history than gay men. Contrary to the incomplete information given in the OED, the word lesbian has meant “female homosexual” since at least the early eighteenth century. William King in his satire The Toast (published 1732, revised 1736), referred to “Lesbians” as women who “loved Women in the same Way as Men love them”. During that century, references to “Sapphic lovers” and “Sapphist” meant a chick who liked “her hold sex in a criminal way”. For centuries before that, comparing a gal to Sappho of Lesbos implied passions that were more than poetic.
Unfortunately we don’t know the origins of the most common queerwords that became popular during the 1930s through 1950s – gay, dyke, faggot, queer, fairy. Dyke, meaning butch woman loving woman, goes back to 1920s black American slang: bull-diker or bull-dagger. It might go back to the 1850s phrase “all diked out” or “all decked out”, meaning faultlessly dressed – in this case, like a man or “bull”. The word faggot goes back to 1914, when “faggots” and “fairies” were said to participate in “drag balls”. Nels Anderson in