Here on Nawti-Naija, we toss around the word SEX so often it feels downright unnatural if we go a few sentences without working it in. But there was a time when that three-letter-word wasn’t quite as common—and new researchshows just when and how that little word has been used over the last 200 years in print. Interested in the history of our favorite word? Read on.
Dred.com, an online doctor community in the United Kingdom, analyzed the Corpus of Historical American English—an online database of more than 100,000 fiction, nonfiction, and periodical documents from 1810 to 2009—for its study on word use. With that out of the way, prepare to be shocked: The word sex peaked between 1810 and 1825, when it was used 250 million times across the texts. Comparatively, sex can be found about half that often in 2009.
Obviously, back in the day the word sex was used mostly in biological terms—in other words, someone’s sex was male or female. “Sex,” according to the study, begins to appear in text in sexual terms in 1948, shortly after the Kinsey Institute released its initial reports on human sexuality. Even then, the word sex was associated with education, and not necessarily fun.
Turns of phrases such as “sex appeal,” “oral sex,” and “sex and nudity” worked their way into texts in the late 20th century, according to the study, while the term “sex partners” entered modern-day language in the 1980s, due in part to the HIV and AIDS epidemic of that decade.
And orgasm? Well that word didn’t make its first appearance in text until 1930. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you view it),orgasm and the word fake weren't linked together in text until the 1970s. We say if there’s a similar study in the future, we do our best to strike that pairing from the books forever.
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