A few years ago, I was called a “bitch” in a workplace meeting simply for speaking up. The word stung, not just as a personal insult, but as part of a long tradition of policing women’s behaviour. Bitch is one of the most charged gendered slurs in English. And yet, today, it can be playful, empowering, or even celebratory.

This contradiction fascinated me. How did one word become both a weapon and a badge of honour? That’s the question I set out to answer in my book, Bitch: The Journey of a Word.

Bitch has a long pedigree. First recorded more than 1,000 years ago as bicce (pronounced “bitch-eh”) in Old English, it began as a straightforward term for a female dog.

Almost immediately, though, it leapt into figurative use as an insult for women, comparable to calling someone a “slut” today. Interestingly, around the same time it became an insult for men as well.

The jump from “dog” to “bitch” as a slur was easy. In ancient Greece and Rome, the equivalent words for “dog” were already being used as a scathing insult – albeit used differently for both genders. Aimed at a woman, it usually........

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