Welcome to the World Sexual Terminology Resource, a webpage for learning about what people around the world call their genitalia. The goal of this project is to make it easier to observe how cultures around the world view their sexuality through language, and to compare and contrast the trends that have developed.
When you want to look something up online, you Google it. In 100 years, search engines may be entirely different, and it's likely that Google won't be the most well-known search engine anymore. The verb to Google, however, will probably still be used to refer to searching the internet. In the future, it will be just another word like escalator, zipper, or aspirin. However, it has captured some of the English-speaking world's history in its usage. There's a reason we still Google things, even when we're using DuckDuckGo or Bing, because when Google first hit the web, it was so good at what it did that, even now, it's still the only search engine worth using for most people. In the future, Google may die out or lose its grasp on the search market, but we'll still Google things, and every time we do, the history of the early Internet will still be there in that word.
The examples I gave before are also genericised trademarks. Zippers were originally only made by B. F. Goodrich, and the Otis Escalator Company originally owned the trademark to the word escalator[22]. Other companies just made moving staircases. Now, any moving staircase is an escalator. However, cultural history is stored in nearly every word we use, not just genericised trademarks. When you get gypped out of something, it may just mean that you got ripped off, but the word's origins aren't that innocent. The word was coined in the late 1800's as a shortening of Gypsy[3]. Knowing that, it's not too hard to figure out how Gypsies were viewed in American society back then.
This issue isn't unique to English or the United States; words usually don't come from thin air anymore. For example, Cantonese is a character-based language. Instead of using an alphabet like we do, they use characters to represent words. Instead of spelling out m-a-n, they just use two characters, 男人, pronounced nam yan. The first character, 男 (nam), means male, and the second character, 人(yan), means person. Unlike English, where letters like m, a, and n usually mean nothing on their own, each character has its own meaning already, and they can be combined to create new words. What is a man? A male human. That's pretty straightforward. Sometimes they can be more abstract in nature, such as the Mandarin word for cuttlefish, 乌贼 (wūzéi), is composed of the characters for dark/black and thief. Unlike male human, this tells us more about how the Chinese viewed cuttlefish when they coined this term than it does about the cuttlefish itself.[51]
Cuttlefish aren't very important parts of everyday life for most people. Sexuality is. In our society it is very uncommon to last very long without either engaging in sexual activity, thinking about it, seeing it, or being told about it. Whether it's seeing a couple kissing in public or having someone tell you that sex before marriage will send you to Hell, the junk between our legs has a pretty big presence in society. So, why not look into the origins of the words we use for our genitalia to see what people thought of sex back in the day? Worldwide, the results aren't too different. Many trends exist across cultures and oceans, so even across nations we can still come together and embrace the fact that lots of our ancestors thought penises and birds - especially roosters - apparently looked pretty similar.
I've compiled the data on this site to compare and contrast how different societies have viewed sex throughout the ages. Sometimes the results can be funny (what language currently has the most slang words for penis that also happen to be used for foods? Italian), other times, hinting at some larger problems (such as the vagina being a hole to be used for man's pleasure, or using the words vulva and vagina interchangably (see vulva disclaimer below)). Since I am not a professional (see the reference disclaimer below), I am not making any claims or statements with this, only hoping to let others learn a bit more about how the world views sexuality through etymology. If you have information you'd like to add to the page, please let me know, I'd love to add more to this site. I hope you'll find this page as interesting and informative as I did.