Urbandictionary lets people input their own definitions to words and then have other people vote on whether they agree or not.  They also have a feature by which users can upload images to go with the words and definitions.

For the word bitch there are two photographs.  One is of a dog with a ball in its mouth.  The other is of Paris Hilton.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words—a saying by the way that the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs can only trace back to 1921 (which makes sense since cameras as a consumer product only began to be sold about 30 years before).

These two bitch pictures go some way to describing the historical course of this word.  But of course there’s more.

Bitch is a word with solidly Germanic origins that would have carried it into the earliest forms of Old English that arrived more than 1500 years ago in Britain with the Anglo-Saxon invaders.  Until around the year 1400 a bitch was usually a female dog, although sometimes other animals got called bitches too, just for being female.

But around 600 years ago female human animals began to be called bitches.  As you might suspect this was not a term of endearment; the first citation calls the poor gal a “scabbed bitch.”

The association seems to have been with a female dog in heat.

If you’ve ever seen a female dog in heat you’ll know that her biology rules her and she doesn’t seem to have much choice but to offer herself to any boy dog she chances to meet.  According to Hugh Rawson from his book Wicked Words the idea was that a woman being called a bitch was being accused of being worse than a prostitute because at least a prostitute stood to gain financially from the broad distribution of her sexual favors.

For a while there starting 500 years ago bitch was applied to men as well, although for them it seems to have been more along the lines of  “you old dog” and not so insulting.

But the Victorian age was coming and so bitch the word went to ground—which I guess makes it a terrier.

Believe it or not people even started calling female dogs doggesses and puppy mothers.

Rawson attributes the reemergence of the word bitch to soldiers during the first and second World Wars.  I suppose if you were in the trenches you’d be more worried about staying alive than being polite.

In any case over the last almost 100 years it has reemerged not only for dogs but for women as well.  The sexuality seems to have been replaced to some extent with an association with argument and complaint.  To bitch at something was a term that didn’t appear until 1930.  The sexuality instead seems to have attached itself to men, but in this case gay men.

Bitch was still a very rude word though when that old dictionary maker Samuel Johnson used it as a teenager—or didn’t quite use it.  I guess we all have conflict in our domestic lives and Johnson was no different.  One day his mother was mad at him and made the mistake of calling him a puppy.  His retort:

“You know what they call a puppy’s mother?”