A glossary of thirty industry terms, each with a date

Thirty terms, each with a date, because in this subject the date is most of the definition. The vocabulary here is either undocumented or written by somebody selling something, and nearly every word in it has changed sides at least once: a technical term that softened into a euphemism, or a euphemism that hardened into a statute. The dates below mark first recorded use, or the law that fixed a meaning. Not the year the thing began.

Courtesans: from the hetaira to Harris’s List

Hetaira. Classical Athens, fifth and fourth centuries BC. An educated companion, and in Greek usage a word held distinct from pornē. Carrying that distinction is the entire job of the term.

Courtesan. From the Italian cortigiana, “woman of the court”, sixteenth century. The court is the point. The word describes position and access before it describes anything else, and it never entirely lost that.

Cortigiana onesta. Venice, sixteenth century, literally “honest courtesan”: educated, culturally accomplished, and drawing clients from the top of the city. A printed Catalogo de tutte le principal et più honorate cortigiane di Venetia circulated in the middle of the century. Veronica Franco, 1546 to 1591, is the documented example.

Bagnio. Eighteenth-century London. It began as the word for a bath-house and then stopped meaning that, which makes it the cleanest example on this list of a technical word going euphemistic and never coming back.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. An annual London directory giving names, addresses and rates, principally at the top of the market, each edition covering roughly 120 to 190 women. A contemporary report of 1791 put its circulation at about 8,000 copies a year. It ended in a prosecution for obscenity. Sources disagree on the run: it is commonly dated 1757 to 1795, while recent bibliographic work dates the surviving sequence 1760 to 1794. Both are in print, and we are not going to quietly pick one.

Madam. The woman keeping the house, in English usage from the eighteenth century. A job title rather than a courtesy title, which is why it has outlived the courtesy sense almost everywhere else.

Paris: the demi-monde and the maison close

Demi-monde. Coined by Alexandre Dumas fils for his play Le Demi-Monde, which opened at the Gymnase dramatique in Paris on 20 March 1855. Literally “half-world”. A demimondaine is a woman of that world, and so the noun cannot predate the play.

Grande horizontale. The Belle Époque term for the era’s most prominent courtesans. The joke inside it is unkind and entirely deliberate, which is worth knowing before anyone deploys it as a compliment.

Grisette, lorette, cocotte. Three nineteenth-century Parisian gradations, each naming a different rung rather than a different trade. The rungs mattered enormously to contemporaries, which the modern habit of treating the three as synonyms erases.

Maison close, also maison de tolérance. The licensed French house. Abolished by the loi Marthe Richard of 13 April 1946, which closed about 1,400 houses, 180 of them in Paris, and destroyed the register.

Licensed quarters and red-light districts

Yoshiwara. Edo’s first licensed pleasure quarter, permitted in 1617, and walled. Licensed and walled are one policy, not two: confinement, described as permission.

Tayū. The highest rank of courtesan. In Edo the rank declined through the first half of the eighteenth century and had effectively disappeared by around its middle, although the term stayed in use in Shimabara and Shinmachi.

Oiran. The Edo term for the highest-ranking Yoshiwara courtesans after the tayū rank lapsed. A replacement at the top of a hierarchy, then, not a synonym for the rank it replaced.

Geisha. Written with the characters for arts and person, so “arts person”. The role emerged from the entertainment offered in and around the licensed quarters, and a geisha is not a courtesan. The confusion is almost entirely a Western import, and this entry exists mostly to say so.

Red-light district. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest print citation is the Sandusky Register, Ohio, 1894; an 1893 use in the Cincinnati Enquirer, about Louisville, Kentucky, runs earlier. The usual explanation is red-shaded lamps in windows. The railwaymen’s-lanterns story is folk etymology, repeated everywhere and evidenced nowhere.

Storyville. New Orleans, established by an ordinance drafted by alderman Sidney Story, in force from 6 July 1897 and closed in 1917. It carries the name of the man who tried to confine the trade, which he did not enjoy.

De Wallen. Amsterdam’s oldest quarter, named for the medieval wallen, the earthen ramparts that once enclosed the settlement. Built up from the fourteenth century around the port, and the trade is documented there from the same century. Dutch usage prefers it where English-language writing reaches for “red-light district”.

Reeperbahn. Hamburg’s entertainment street. The six-floor Eros Center opened there in 1967, the largest brothel in Europe at the time, and closed in the late 1980s.

Law: offences and the four policy models

Soliciting. England and Wales, section 1 of the Street Offences Act 1959: loitering or soliciting in a street or public place.

Kerb-crawling. England and Wales, the Sexual Offences Act 1985, which followed the Criminal Law Revision Committee’s 1984 report on street prostitution.

Brothel-keeping. England and Wales, the Sexual Offences Act 1956. The offence attaches to premises and to whoever keeps them, which is why the word turns up in cases far from any house in the older sense.

Strict liability. Section 14 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009, in force 1 April 2010. Paying for the services of a person subjected to force, threats, coercion or deception is an offence whether or not the payer knew. That is what strict liability means in general legal use: knowledge is not a defence.

Nordic model, also the Swedish model. Sweden, 1999, as part of the Kvinnofrid reform. Buying is criminalised; selling is not.

Decriminalisation. New Zealand, Prostitution Reform Act 2003. Distinct from legalisation, and the distinction is mechanical: it removes offences rather than building a licensing regime.

Legalisation and regulation. The Netherlands lifted its general brothel ban on 1 October 2000. Germany passed the Prostitutionsgesetz in 2002 and the Prostituiertenschutzgesetz in 2017.

Escorts, sex work and the platform vocabulary

Escort agency. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for the phrase is 1903, in the Sunday Journal of Indianapolis, which is a good deal earlier than most people guess. Escort itself reached English through the French escorter, from the Italian scorgere.

Sex work, sex worker. Coined by the activist Carol Leigh, who performed as Scarlot Harlot. Sources disagree on the year: 1978 and 1979 both appear, and Leigh’s own account places it at a conference panel she renamed. The term was built to put the noun “work” in the frame, which is also why it is contested by people who dispute exactly that.

Token, freemium, camming. The platform vocabulary. MyFreeCams inverted the paid model in 2004 and Chaturbate made tokens standard in 2011. A token is a prepaid unit bought at one price and redeemed at another, and that gap is where the economics sit; the full sequence is in the history of the webcam.

FOSTA-SESTA. United States, April 2018. The statute is American and the effect was not: this is the point at which platform terms of service began doing the work that statute used to do.

Gentlemen’s club. Two unrelated things wearing one phrase: the London private members’ institutions, and, in American usage from the later twentieth century, strip clubs. The ambiguity is load-bearing, and a search result will not always tell you which one you have found.

What the dates are for

Two things are worth carrying out of a list like this. A dated word tells you what it was for at the time, which is rarely what it is used for now. And most of these terms reached us through somebody with an interest in how they sounded, which is the argument for writing them down with the sources attached.

This is the vocabulary the Rankings tables and the City Index entries are scored in, and the living half of it turns up again in what a night actually costs and in the guide to etiquette. How we source entries and how we correct them is set out in the editorial standards.