The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next?

by Karen Stollznow  BIO

The US writer and activist Alix Shulman holding a poster at the Miss America protest, Atlantic City, 1968. Courtesy Alix Kates Shulman Papers, David M Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University; photograph copyright Alix Kates Shulman, used with permission

is a linguist, author, researcher and speaker whose work explores the intersections of language, culture, identity and belief. She is a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Her books include On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (2020), Bitch: The Journey of a Word (2024) and Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language (forthcoming, 2026).

‘Bitch’ is a word with bite. Once a straightforward insult, it is now used in so many different ways that it’s no longer clear what it means. Bitch is a linguistic chameleon: there are good bitches and bad bitches; boss bitches and perfect bitches; sexy, difficult, dangerous or even psycho bitches. After so many variations and attempts to reject or reclaim the word, some now wear the label defiantly, while others still have it thrown at them. Its evolution is messy, complicated and revealing.

A single word can tell us a great deal. The journey of bitch, from a literal term for a female dog to one of the most charged words in the English language, shows how language shifts alongside changing ideas about gender, power and identity. In this case, it suggests that sometimes you really can teach an old dog new tricks.

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In its most literal sense, a bitch is a female dog, and this is also the word’s earliest meaning. Because bitch feels so contemporary, so casually present in everyday speech, it’s easy to assume it’s a relatively recent addition to the language. The etymology, however, tells a different story. ‘Bitch’ meaning ‘female dog’ dates to around 1000 CE, giving the word a pedigree that stretches back more than 1,000 years. It is older than ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’, and older than many of the insults we now think of as timeless.

In those early centuries, the word didn’t quite look, or sound, the same. Bitch is an Old English word, inherited from Germanic, and during the Anglo-Saxon period it would have been unfamiliar to modern readers. Old English was the spoken and written language of the time, though literacy was limited, and bitch appeared as bicce, pronounced roughly as ‘bitch-eh’.

The earliest recorded use of bitch is from a medieval text known as the Medicina de Quadrupedibus – Medicines from Four-Footed Creatures: a compendium of traditional remedies made from animal parts. Originally written in Latin and translated into Old English in the 11th century, the manuscript contains two early examples of bitch used in its literal sense.

Over time, the term broadened to include foxes and wolves, and later bears, seals, otters and even ferrets

One appears in a remedy for teething pain involving ‘bitch’s milk’: Biccean meolc gif ðu gelome cilda toðreoman mid smyrest & æthrinest, butan sare hy wexað: ‘If you frequently smear and touch a child’s gums with bitch’s milk, the teeth grow without pain.’ Another cites ‘bitch’s urine’ as a treatment for corns and warts: Wearras & weartan onweg to donne, nim wulle & wæt mid biccean hlonde, wrið on þa weartan & on þa wearras: ‘To do away with corns and warts, take wool and wet it with bitch’s urine, bind it to the warts and corns.’ In the folk medicine of the time, dogs were believed to possess medicinal, even magical, properties, and their bodily fluids were thought to offer therapeutic benefits.

We also occasionally find the word spelled bicge in Old English, a reminder that its modern form was far from settled. (We can still spot the modern descendants of other contemporaneous spellings, such as frocga [frog] and stacga [stag].) Over the centuries, bitch underwent a series of shifts in both pronunciation and spelling. In surviving manuscripts, it appears in many guises, from bycce in early Middle English to becch, bichche, bych and bytche in later forms of the language. Scottish texts introduced further variations, including beiche and beitch.

These inconsistencies reflect the fact that English spelling had yet to be standardised. That began to change in the 15th century, when William Caxton introduced the printing press to England, helping to freeze spellings in place (at least in theory). By the 17th century, bitch had largely settled into its modern form, sometimes with an -e tacked on to the end. Examples from this period are far more recognisable, such as this line from a collection of vulgar poetry:

Nor putting Pigs t’ a Bitch to nurse;To turn ’em into Mungrel-Curs.

Over time, the term broadened to include other female, four-legged, furred canines, such as foxes and wolves, and later extended to female members of other carnivorous mammals, including bears, seals, otters and even ferrets. As the centuries passed, bitch changed not only in how it sounded and looked but, more importantly, in what it meant.

We can’t talk about ‘bitch’ without also talking about ‘dog’. Long before bitch became an insult in its own right, dog was already doing that work. Referring to people as dogs, women and men alike, is far older than the English language itself. The practice can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, where canine metaphors were commonly used to signal moral failure, social inferiority or a lack of self-control.

In the Odyssey, Helen of Troy reflects on her role in the adultery that sparked the Trojan War. Celebrated as the most beautiful woman in the world, she condemns herself: ‘when the Achaeans went down to Troy on account of dog-faced me, raising up their audacious war.’ Canine metaphors carried sharply gendered meanings. A man described as a dog was seen as greedy, arrogant or cowardly; a woman branded the same way was judged disobedient, immodest and sexually licentious. The Greeks loved dog as an insult because dogs embodied what polite society feared: shamelessness, appetite without restraint and a refusal to know one’s place. To call someone a dog was to brand them brazen and antisocial, someone who flouted social boundaries and moral restraint.

Almost as soon as bitch was used to mean a female dog, it was also applied to women. The word underwent a classic case of pejoration, shifting from a neutral descriptor to a slur for a sexually promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behaviour of a ‘bitch in heat’. In the Middle Ages, a bitch could refer quite straightforwardly to a prostitute. The term functioned much like ‘whore’, and later came to overlap with what we would now call ‘slut’. Traces of this older meaning still linger. In some dialects and cultural contexts, including rap and hip-hop, bitch continues to carry connotations of........

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