Twat

Twat , which is usually pronounced to rhyme with “hot” but can rhyme with “hat,” is now a well-established slang term meaning a woman’s genitals. Included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1916 but marked as “obsolete,” it has become quite common as a modern term of abuse for a “worthless male person” in the same fashion as cunt , but with less impact. Its origins are complex and confused. Recorded from about 1650, the term is described as “of obscure origin,” but was linked to the verb form in a quotation from James Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847): “The buck or doe twateth, makes a noise at rutting time.” However, the OED dismisses this as an “error for troat ,” meaning “to cry or bellow, said of a buck at rutting time,” recorded from 1611.

The genital sense of twat is recorded in Nathaniel Bailey’s dictionary of 1727, defined as pudendum muliebre , whereafter there is a surprising gap of two centuries until it is resuscitated by such outspoken modern authors as E.E. Cummings, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Germaine Greer. This long hiatus perhaps explains the following curious anecdote. The famous Victorian poet Robert Browning evidently came across this unfamiliar term in a caustic context in a satirical poem called the “Vanity of Vanities” (1660):

They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s hat,

They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.

(ll. 49-50)

Browning committed the hilarious catachresis (serious linguistic error) of using the word in “Pippa Passes” (1848) as the OED puts it, “under the impression that it denoted some part of a nun’s attire”:

Then owls and bats

Cowls and twats

Monks and nuns, in cloister’s moods,

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.

(IV ii 96-99)

This is a classic instance of the dangers of using an underground slang term without being sure of its meaning. (The Cardinal’s Hat was the name of a Bankside brothel in Elizabethan London.)

The use as a term of vulgar personal abuse is fairly recent, being first recorded by Frederic Manning in his war memoir The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) and subsequently taken up by such contemporary authors as Philip Roth and John Updike. A surprising contemporary instance was Britain’s Princess Anne’s comment that a news reporter who had fraudulently gained access to Buckingham Palace by posing as a servant was “a fucking incompetent twat” ( Daily Mirror , November 21, 2003).