Fornication is something that American politicians are not supposed to do, yet they seem to get caught doing it on a fairly regular basis. Americans tend to be both fascinated by fornication and embarrassed by it. In the nineteenth century, the eminent lexicographer and politician Noah Webster brought out a new edition of the Bible in which he removed the word “fornication” and replaced it with the more acceptable (at that time) term “lewdness.” Let’s take a journey into the catacombs of English to see where this word comes from.
Today, fornication refers to sexual activity between two people who are not married to each other. Many states have laws against this, usually based on supposed religious prohibitions against this type of sexual activity. The term, however, did not originate with sex, but with architecture.
There were once subterranean vaults beneath the streets of Rome (that’s the one in Italy) which served as the dwellings for vagrants, criminals, and low-class people. Among these low-class people were prostitutes who were unable to work in the official brothels. Thus, these prostitutes often worked under an arch or vault—an architectural feature known as fornix in Latin. In spite of the fact that there were official brothels, there was lots of sex being bought and sold in these subterranean vaults. Thus fornix became synonymous with brothel.
In the fourteenth century, fornix entered the English language: a fornatrix is a prostitute; a fornicator is the client of a prostitute, and fornication is the sexual activity between the fornatrix and the fornicator. Today, one does not have to stand or work under an arch to fornicate.
Fornication is first recorded in Middle English about 1303.
While there are many who feel that adultery is something that adults do, the origins of the word are not really related to adult. Adultery comes from the Latin “adulterāre” which means “to debauch, to corrupt.” In Old French “adulterāre” became “avoutrer” and this is the origin of the word in English.