fornication

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“
Chaucer used swive only to describe adulterous or clandestine fornication, and one can see how a word in such a smelly role will easily give way to another more foreign and vigorous: it is much easier and funnier to swear in a foreign language, as Americans have found with the British bloody, for instance.

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Definitions (8)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. noun Sexual intercourse between partners who are not married to each other.
  2. Word History
    The word fornication had a lowly beginning suitable to what has long been the low moral status of the act to which it refers. The Latin word fornix, from which fornicātiō, the ancestor of fornication, is derived, meant "a vault, an arch.” The term also referred to a vaulted cellar or similar place where prostitutes plied their trade. This sense of fornix in Late Latin yielded the verb fornicārī, "to commit fornication,” from which is derived fornicātiō, "whoredom, fornication.” Our word is first recorded in Middle English about 1303.

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Examples

  • In all countries there has been fornication, as in all countries there has been theft; but there may be more or less of the one, as well as of the other, in proportion to the force of law. —  Life of Johnson
  • All men will naturally commit fornication, as all men will naturally steal. —  Life of Johnson
  • Chaucer used swive only to describe adulterous or clandestine fornication, and one can see how a word in such a smelly role will easily give way to another more foreign and vigorous: it is much easier and funnier to swear in a foreign language, as Americans have found with the British bloody, for instance. —  VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol IV No 1
  • I told him, that by the rules of the Church of Scotland, in their Book of Discipline, if a scandal, as it is called, is not prosecuted for five years, it cannot afterwards be proceeded upon, 'unless it be of a heinous nature, or again become flagrant;' and that hence a question arose, whether fornication was a sin of a heinous nature; and that I had maintained, that it did not deserve that epithet, in as much as it was not one of those sins which argue very great depravity of heart: in short, was not, in the general acceptation of mankind, a heinous sin. —  Life Of Johnson
  • All of this fornication is a horrible modern thing brought on by television and video games and BOOKS! " —  Maureen's Blog
 

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Fornication has been looked up 469 times, favorited 0 times, listed 19 times, and commented on once.

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Etymologies (2)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (2)

  1. from Latin fornicatio(n-), a vaulting or arching over, from fornicatus, arched: see fornicate, a.
  2. from Middle English fornicatioun, -cioiin, from Old French fornication, French fornication= Provencal fornicatio = Spanish fornicacion = Portuguese fornicação = Italian fornicazione, from Late Latin fornicatio(n-), from fornicari, fornicate: see fornicate.
 

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/fɔrnɪˈkeɪʃən/
by American Heritage

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