We naturally perceive our ancestors as the “old and wise” ones. “Listen to your grandfather! He knows better!” is what your mom would say when you start arguing about the back garden and where the tomatoes would grow. Old photos would show our great-great-great aunt sitting for a sepia-toned photo that cost a fortune along with your great-great-great cousins, stern-faced. Even your cousins wouldn’t crack a smile.
Our perception of our ancestors has been very serious — the people who have gone through hundred-year wars, famine, even the plague. Working hard, in poverty, against all odds and still surviving have earned our deep respect, so it’s especially hilarious when you start truly reading into both ancient and more recent history and start finding things out like the reason that everybody looks so stern on old photos is that photos took forever to actually copy the image in front of them so staying in the same smiling position was simply horribly uncomfortable, and that fart jokes were the main show at any ancient greek play.
Here’s when things get even more hilarious — our ancestors absolutely loved cursing at each other, and they loved to get very creative with it. For your convenience, I will put the words with their translations into handy little columns in alphabetical order, just in case you need to find them quickly.
I will be exploring today the three most colourful branches of curse words, the most densely concentrated and interesting ones that really got creative.
Let’s start chronologically — with the Ancient Greeks, this is our part one out of three. The people that came up with philosophy do not disappoint when it comes to curse words, in fact, they were so popular in the common tongue back in the day that even Romans absolutely loved using them. Kind of like cursing in French nowadays. The good mister Spencer McDaniel has been polite enough to share his findings with the public, writing an obscene amount of curse words derived from various sources of archives, and now I will share them with you.
ἀνασεισίφαλλος (anaseisíphallos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: ἀνασεισιφάλλου) • This word literally means “cock-shaker.” It is formed from the combination of the verb ἀνασείω (anaseíō), meaning “to shake” or “to agitate,” with the noun φαλλός (phallós), meaning “penis.” Hipponax uses it as a term of insult for a woman in his Fragment 135.
βάταλος (bátalos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: βατάλου) • This is an insulting word for a man who enjoys being anally penetrated by another man, but it is commonly used to refer to any man who is regarded as sexually debauched. The biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) mentions in his Life of Demosthenes 4 that the word may have also been used as an obscene word for the rectum itself.
βαυβών (baubṓn) • third-declension masculine (genitive: βαυβῶνος) • This word refers to a dildo made of leather. As I previously mentioned in this article I wrote back in October 2020
, this word was most famously used by the Greek comic poet Herodas, who lived in around the third century BCE, in his Mime VI, a comedy sketch about a woman who has recently purchased a red leather dildo. The scene is known from a papyrus that was discovered in Egypt in the nineteenth century. When the papyrus was first discovered, many Victorian scholars tried to insist that the object the woman had acquired couldn’t possibly be an obscene implement intended for masturbatory purposes. They tried to explain it away as an article of clothing—perhaps a hat, or a shoe, or a bodice. Only in the early twentieth century did scholars finally come to accept that the βαυβών was really a dildo.
βόλβιτον (bólbiton) • second-declension neuter (genitive: βολβίτου) • The word literally means “cowshit.” Hipponax uses the insult “βολβίτου κασιγνήτην” (i.e., “sister of cowshit”) in his Fragment 144.
βορβορόπη (borborópē) • first-declension feminine (genitive: βορβορόπης) • This word literally means “opening of filth.” Hipponax uses this phrase as an insult in Fragment 135b.
ἑταίρα (hetaíra) • first-declension feminine (genitive: ἑταίρας) • According to conventional understanding, in classical Greece, a hetaira was a woman who would act as a hired companion for upper-class male clients and might, in some cases, perform sex acts at her client’s request. It is often thought that the distinction between a hetaira and a common prostitute was blurred and that hetairai, in most cases, probably functioned as essentially classy prostitutes. This definition of a hetaira, however, has been challenged from various quarters.
ἰθύφαλλος (ithýphallos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: ἰθυφάλλου) • This word means “erect penis.” It especially refers to the enormous models of erect penises that were carried at festivals of the Greek god Dionysos. It is the source of the English word ithyphallic.
κατωμόχανος (katōmóchanos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: κατωμοχάνου) • This word means “a person who has been fucked in the ass so many times that their asshole gapes all the way to their shoulders.” Hipponax uses this phrase in his Fragment 28 to insult an unfortunate painter named Mimnes, who apparently painted an image of a serpent that Hipponax disliked along the side of a trireme.
κίναιδος (kínaidos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: κιναίδου) • This word generally refers to a man who engages in non-normative sexual behavior, does not fulfill the standard qualities of traditional Greek masculinity, and who is seen as effeminate. It often connotes a man who enjoys being anally penetrated by another man. It is normally a term of abuse. It is the source of the Latin word cinaedus, which Catullus famously uses as an insult against Furius in “Carmen 16.”
κύσθος (kýsthos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: κύσθου) • This is an obscene word meaning “female genitalia.” It appears to be somewhat more sexually explicit than the word χοῖρος. It is most directly analogous to the English word cunt, although it probably did not have quite the same taboo.
κέντρον (kéntron) • second-declension neuter (genitive: κέντρου) • This word literally means “barb,” “spur,” or “thorn,” but it is frequently used in an obscene sense to mean “erect penis.” It is therefore analogous to the English word dick or cock. The Greek poet Sotades of Maroneia famously used the word in this sense in an obscene palindromic epigram making fun of the Hellenistic king Ptolemaios II Philadelphos of Egypt (ruled 284 – 246 BCE), who notoriously married his own sister. The epigram is preserved through quotation by Ploutarchos of Chaironeia in his treatise On the Education of Children 11a. It reads as follows: “εἰς οὐχ ὁσίην τρυμαλιὴν τὸ κέντρον ὠθεῖς.” In English, this means: “You are shoving your dick into a hole that is not holy.”
κόπρος (kópros) • second-declension feminine (genitive: κόπρου) • This word means “dung” or “feces.” It is not an inherently offensive word in and of itself like the English word shit and it is used in high literature. For instance, it is used in the Odyssey 9.329. Nonetheless, the word can certainly be used in offensive ways, as demonstrated by the iambic verses of Hipponax. The word is still used in Modern Greek with almost exactly the same meaning it had in antiquity. It is also the root of English words like coprolite, coprophilia, and coprolalia.
κυσολάκων (kysolákōn) • third-declension masculine (genitive: κυσολάκωνος) • The word literally means “ass-Spartan.” It refers to a man who engages in anal sex, either with a male or with a female. As I discuss in this article I published in January 2021
, people in other city-states stereotyped the Spartans for allegedly preferring anal sex over vaginal. An allusion to this stereotype occurs in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, lines 1162–1170. A definition for the word κυσολάκων is given by Photios (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) in his lexicon of the Greek language (p. 192.12).
λαγνεία (lagneía) • first-declension feminine (genitive: λαγνείας) • This word primarily means “sexual intercourse,” but it can be used with a looser meaning of “lasciviousness” or “lustful activity.” It is not an inherently offensive word, but it can be used in offensive ways.
λειμών (leimṓn) • third declension masculine (genitive: λειμῶνος) • This word literally means “meadow,” but it is commonly used in an obscene sense to mean “female genitalia.”
μητροκοίτης (mētrokoítēs) • first-declension masculine (genitive: μητροκοίτου) • The word literally means “mother-bedder.” It is formed from the third-declension feminine noun μήτηρ (mḗtēr), meaning “mother,” and the first-declension feminine noun κοίτη (koítē), meaning “bed.” It is therefore directly analogous to the English word motherfucker. Hipponax famously uses it as an insult in his Fragment 12, writing: “…ὁ μητροκοίτης Βούπαλος σὺν Ἀρήτῃ καὶ ὑφέλξων τὸν δυσώνυμον ἄρτον.” This means: “…Boupalos, the motherfucker with Arete, was also preparing to pull back his ill-named foreskin.”
μύζουρις (mýzouris) • third-declension feminine (genitive: μυζούριδος) • This word refers to a person, generally a woman, who orally stimulates a man’s penis. It is formed from the combination of the verb μυζάω (muzáō), meaning “to suck,” and the noun οὐρά (ourá), which literally means “tail,” but is often used in an obscene sense to mean “penis.” The word is therefore directly analogous to the English word cocksucker.
ὄλισβος (ólisbos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: ὀλίσβου) • This word refers to a dildo made of leather. It is a synonym for the word βαυβών. In Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, lines 108–110, the character Lysistrata remarks to a group of her fellow women: “ἐξ οὗ γὰρ ἡμᾶς προὔδοσαν Μιλήσιοι, οὐκ εἶδον οὐδ᾽ ὄλισβον ὀκτωδάκτυλον, ὃς ἦν ἂν ἡμῖν σκυτίνη ‘πικουρία.” This means: “Indeed, ever since the Milesians betrayed us, I haven’t seen any dildo eight fingers in length, which might have been a leather succor to us all.” This is apparently a reference to the fact that the city of Miletos in Asia Minor, which was the main exporter of leather dildos in the classical Aegean, attempted to break away from Athenian rule shortly after the Athenians suffered catastrophic military defeat in the Sicilian campaign in 413 BCE.
ὄμειχμα (ómeichma) • third-declension neuter noun (genitive: ὀμείχματος) • This word means “urine.” It comes from the verb ὀμείχω (omeíchō), meaning “to urinate.”
ὄρρος (órrhos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: ὄρρου) • This is an obscene word meaning “ass.” Much like the English word ass, it can refer to the exterior buttocks, the anus, or the rectum.
οὖρον (oûron) • second-declension neuter noun (genitive: οὔρου) • This word means “urine.” It is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂wers-, which means “to drip.”
πέος (péos) • third-declension neuter (genitive: πέους) • This is the most common obscene word for “penis” in Ancient Greek. It is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *pes-, which is the same root from which our English word penis is derived. Nonetheless, the word πέος is more directly analogous in its meaning to the English words dick and cock. It is commonly used in works of Old Comedy. For instance, in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, line 124, Lysistrata tells her fellow women: “ἀφεκτέα τοίνυν ἐστὶν ἡμῖν τοῦ πέους.” This means: “Now it is necessary for us to abstain from cock.” Meanwhile, the word πέος is never used at all in medical writings, such as those of Galenos of Pergamon (lived 129 – c. 210 CE).
πορνεῖον (porneîon) • second-declension neuter (genitive: πορνείου) • This is the most common Greek word for a brothel.
πόρνη (pórnē) • first-declension feminine (genitive: πόρνης) • This word refers to a female prostitute. It is the root of the English word pornography.
πόρνος (pórnos) • second-declension masculine (genitive: πόρνου) • This word refers to a male prostitute.
πορνοβοσκός (pornoboskós) • second-declension masculine (genitive: πορνοβοσκοῦ) • This word refers to a brothel-keeper or pimp.
πρωκτός (prōktós) • second-declension masculine (genitive: πρωκτοῦ) • This word refers to the anus and rectum. It is a common word in Old Comedy. For instance, in Aristophanes’s comedy The Wasps, lines 603–604, the character Bdelykleon says: “…κἀναφανήσει πρωκτὸς λουτροῦ περιγιγνόμενος τῆς ἀρχῆς τῆς περισέμνου.” This means: “…and you will be revealed as an asshole which triumphs over the bath with august power.” The word πρωκτός is the root of the English words proctologist and proctotomy.
πυγή (pygḗ) • first-declension feminine (genitive: πυγῆς) • This is the most common Ancient Greek word meaning “buttocks.” The Greek goddess Aphrodite was widely known by the epithet Καλλίπυγος (Kallípygos), which means “One with the Beautiful Buttocks.” There are surviving statues depicting her in this aspect, showing her lifting up her dress to reveal her plump buttocks and peering over her shoulder as if to examine them.
σάθη (sáthē) • first-declension feminine (genitive: σάθης) • This word means “cock.” It is used by the Greek lyric poet Archilochos of Paros (lived c. 680 – c. 645 BCE) in his Fragment 43, which reads as follows: “ἡ δέ οἱ σάθη… ὥστ᾿ ὄνου Πριηνέως κήλωνος ἐπλήμυρεν ὀτρυγηφάγου.” This means: “And his cock was overflowing just like that of a Prienian donkey, well-bred and fed on corn.”
σκῶρ (skôr) • third-declension neuter (genitive: σκατός) • The word means “feces.” It is the root of the Modern Greek word σκατό, meaning “shit,” and probably also the English word scat.
τριβάς (tribás) • third-declension feminine (genitive: τριβάδος) • This noun is derived from the verb τρίβω (tríbō), meaning “to rub,” “to thresh,” “to grind,” or “to wear down.” The noun generally applies to a woman who engages in sexual activities with other women, particularly activities which involve aggressively rubbing the vulva of another woman in some manner.
φαλλός (phallós) • second-declension masculine (genitive: φαλλοῦ) • This is the standard, non-offensive word for “penis,” analogous to the English word penis itself. It is the source of the English word phallus.
χαλκιδῖτις (chalkidîtis) • third-declension feminine (genitive: χαλκιδίτιδος) • This is an obscene word for a very cheap female prostitute who will have sex with any man for only a single bronze coin.
χοῖρος (choîros) • second-declension masculine (genitive: χοίρου) • The word literally means “piglet,” but it was widely used in ancient slang to refer to female genitalia, particularly those of a young woman, in much the same way that the English word pussy, which nominally refers to a cat, is commonly used to refer to female genitalia. Aristophanes exploits the double meaning of the word in his comedy The Acharnians, which includes a scene in which a starving Megarian farmer tries to sell his attractive daughters to the character Dikaiopolis by passing them off as piglets. Dikaiopolis says to the Megarian regarding one of his daughters, in lines 782–783: “νῦν γε χοῖρος φαίνεται. ἀτὰρ ἐκτραφείς γε κύσθος ἔσται.” This means: “Now at least it looks like a piglet. But once it’s been reared, it’ll be a cunt.” The early Christian writer Klemes of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) mentions in his apologetic treatise Exhortation to the Hellenes 92.82–83 that the Greek god Dionysos was known by the epithet χοιροψάλας (choiropsálas), which means “pussy-plucker.”
ψωλή (psōlḗ) • first-declension feminine (genitive: ψωλῆς) • In Ancient Greek, this is a fairly uncommon word that refers specifically to a circumcised penis, but, in Modern Greek, it has become a generic word meaning “dick.”
αἰσχρός (aischrós), αἰσχρά (aischrá), αἰσχρόν (aischrón) • In Ancient Greek, this word means “shameful,” “dishonorable,” “ugly,” or “infamous.” The word is still used in Modern Greek, but it has come to more specifically mean “rude,” “salacious,” or “obscene.”
εὐρύπρωκτος (eurýprōktos), εὐρύπρωκτον (eurýprōkton) • This word literally means “wide-assed.” It refers to a person who has been anally penetrated so many times that their anus is literally gaping open. It is an extremely common insult in Attic comedy. For instance, in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, lines 1086–1106, the characters Just Argument (a conservative moralist) and Unjust Argument (a clever sophist) have a debate in which Just Argument argues that there is no worse fate than having a gaping asshole, because it is shameful to be anally penetrated. Unjust Argument, however, goes on to prove that people with gaping assholes run the whole world, leading Just Argument to give up and admit that Unjust Argument has won.
κοπροφάγος (koprophágos), κοπροφάγον (koprophágon) • The word literally means “shit-eating.” It is formed from the word κόπρος (kópros), meaning “dung” or “feces,” plus the word φάγος (phágos), meaning “eater” or “glutton.”
λάγνος (lágnos), λάγνη (lágnē), λάγνον (lágnon) • This word means “lecherous,” “lewd,” or “lustful.” It is most often used to describe men.
λαμυρός (lamyrós), λαμυρά (lamyrá), λαμυρόν (lamyrón) • This word literally means “abyss-like,” but was commonly used in an extended figurative sense to mean “greedy,” “wanton,” “flirtatious,” or “sexually suggestive.”
μαλακός (malakós), μαλακή (malakḗ), μαλακόν (malakón) • In Ancient Greek, this word literally just means “soft,” but, when it is used to describe a man, it implies that he is weak, cowardly, and effeminate. Starting in around the tenth century CE, Greek-speakers came to associate this word with masturbation. Thus, the Modern Greek insult μαλάκα (maláka), which literally means “masturbator,” eventually developed. In Ancient Greek, however, this word has nothing to do with masturbation.
μάχλος (máchlos), μάχλον (máchlon) • This word means “lewd,” “lustful,” or “wanton.” It is most often used to describe women.
σπάταλος (spátalos), σπάταλον (spátalon) • The word generally means “lascivious” or “sexually depraved.”
βινέω (binéō) • epsilon-contract verb • This is the closest Ancient Greek equivalent to the English word “to fuck.” It never occurs in medical texts or works of high literature, but it occurs all over the place in comedies, obscene poems, and graffiti. For instance, Aristophanes uses it in his comedy The Frogs, lines 739–740: “πῶς γὰρ οὐχὶ γεννάδας, ὅστις γε πίνειν οἶδε καὶ βινεῖν μόνον;” This means: “Indeed, how is he not noble, the sort of man who only knows how drink and fuck?” If, for some reason, you wanted to command someone to “fuck” in Ancient Greek, the second-person singular present active imperative form of the verb would be βίνει (bínei).
γλωττοδεψέω (glōttodepséō) • epsilon-contract verb • This word means “to perform a blowjob.” It is formed from the combination of the noun γλῶττα (glôtta), meaning “tongue,” and the verb δεψέω (depséō), meaning “to work something until it is soft.” The word therefore literally means “to work a thing with the tongue until it is soft.”
δέφομαι (déphomai) • This is the medio-passive form of the verb δέφω (déphō), which, in the active voice, is a non-offensive verb meaning “to kneed” or “to make soft.” The medio-passive form, by contrast, is a vulgar expression meaning “to jerk off” or “to masturbate.” Aristophanes uses the word in this sense in his comedy The Knights. In the opening scene, one slave instructs another slave to pretend to masturbate, telling in him in lines 24–25: “ὥσπερ δεφόμενος νῦν ἀτρέμα πρῶτον λέγε τὸ μόλωμεν.” This means: “Now, as though you were jerking off, first say it without trembling: ‘Let us come!’”
κορινθιάζομαι (korinthiázomai) • deponent verb • This verb literally means “to act like a Corinthian,” but, since the city of Corinth was famous in antiquity for its many high-class prostitutes, the verb is normally used to mean “to consort with prostitutes.” A definition of the word is attested in the sixth-century CE Greek lexicographer Stephanos of Byzantion’s dictionary Ethnika 374.5.
λαγνεύω (lagneúō) • standard omega verb conjugation • This is the standard, non-offensive Greek verb meaning “to have sex.”
λαικάζω (laikázō) • standard omega verb conjugation • This is the most common word in Ancient Greek meaning “to perform a blowjob.” If you wanted to command a person to perform a blowjob, the second-person singular present active imperative form of this verb would be λαίκαζε (laíkaze).
λεσβιάζω (lesbiázō) • standard omega verb conjugation • This word is derived from the name of the Greek island of Lesbos. It literally means “to act like a person from Lesbos.” An ancient scholion on Aristophanes’s Wasps, line 1346, explains that the word is commonly used to mean “to perform a blowjob,” since the women of the island of Lesbos were said to have invented blowjobs.
ληκάω (lēkáō) • alpha-contract verb • The meaning of this word is not entirely clear, but it is definitely an obscene word that refers to some kind of sexual act. It only appears in a few surviving passages. Robin Seager argues that it is the Greek equivalent of the Latin word irrumō, which means “to forcibly shove one’s erect penis down another person’s throat.” David Bain, however, argues fairly convincing in his paper “Six Greek Verbs of Sexual Congress” (published in 1991 in The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 51–77) that it is simply a synonym for βινέω and that it just means “to fuck.”
οἴφω (oíphō) • standard omega verb conjugation • This word means “to fuck.” It is a less commonly used synonym for βινέω. It seems to have been more commonly used in the Doric dialect than in other dialects.
ὀμείχω (omeíchō) • standard omega verb conjugation • This word means “to urinate.” It is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₃meyǵʰ-, which also means “to urinate.”
πυγίζω (pygízō) • standard omega verb conjugation • This is the most common word in Ancient Greek meaning “to fuck someone in the ass.” It is obviously derived from the noun πυγή (pygḗ), meaning “buttocks.” It is the Greek equivalent to the Latin word pēdīcō.
ῥαφανιδόω (rhaphanidóō) • omicron-contract verb • This word means ”to shove a radish up someone’s asshole.” The idea that a person might be punished for sexual misdeeds by having a radish shoved up their anus and their pubic hairs singed off with hot coals occurs in Old Comedy. In Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, line 1083, Just Argument asks Unjust Argument the rhetorical question: “τί δ᾽ ἢν ῥαφανιδωθῇ πιθόμενός σοι τέφρᾳ τε τιλθῇ;” This means: “And what if he gets a radish shoved up his ass and his pubic hair singed off with hot coals because he trusted you?” As far as I am aware, the second-person singular present middle imperative form of this verb is not attested in any ancient source, but it would presumably be ῥαφανιδοῦ (rhaphanidoû). This would presumably be the command, “Go shove a radish up your ass!”
If you are interested in reading the full article by Spencer McDaniel, who gets the full credit and props for deriving these amazing curse words, that explains how and where he found them, you can check out his full (and very long) article on Quora.
In the next article, I will very gladly show you the Romans and how they cursed at each other, and remember — never take anything too seriously!
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