page_title: Dyke (slang)
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Dyke (slang) / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Dyke March 2008, in Boston, Massachusetts. Dykes march around the Boston Common and then whoop it up for a while with music and events.
context_page_description: The term dyke is a slang term, used as a noun meaning lesbian and as an adjective describing things associated with lesbianism. It originated as a homophobic and misogynistic slur for a masculine, butch, tomboyish, or androgynous girl or woman. While pejorative use of the word still exists, the term dyke has been reappropriated by out and proud lesbians to imply assertiveness and toughness, or simply as a neutral synonym for lesbian.
context_section_description: The origin of the term dyke is obscure and many theories have been proposed. Most etymologies assert that dyke is derived from bulldyke, which has a similar meaning. The term first appears in an August 1921 article in the journal Medical Review of Reviews titled "The 'Fairy' and the Lady Lover". In this article, Perry M. Lichtenstein, a prison physician in New York City, reports on the case of a female prisoner he examined: "She stated that she had indulged in the practice of 'bull diking,' as she termed it. She was a prisoner in one of the reformatories, and there a certain young woman fell in love with her." The forms bulldyker and bulldyking also appear in several Harlem Renaissance novels of the 1920s, including Eric D. Walrond's 1926 Tropic Death, Carl van Vechten's 1926 Nigger Heaven, and Claude McKay's 1928 Home to Harlem. In these novels the term is used as African-American vernacular speech. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first attestation as Berrey and Van den Bark's 1942 American Thesaurus of Slang, which lists bulldiker as a synonym for lesbian.
  The etymology of bulldyke is also obscure. It may be related to the late-19th-century slang use of dike ("ditch") for the vulva. Bull ("male cattle") being used in the sense of "masculine" and "aggressive" (e.g., in bullish), a bulldyke would have implied (with similar levels of offensiveness) a "masculine cunt". Other theories include that bulldyke derived from morphodite, a variant of hermaphrodite; that it was a term for stud bulls and originally applied to sexually successful men; or that it was a dialectical corruption of the name of the rebel Celtic queen Boadicea.
  From the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, dike had been American slang for a well-dressed man, with "diked out" and "out on a dike" indicating a young man was in his best clothes and ready for a night on the town. The etymology of that term is also obscure, but may have originated as a Virginian variant of deck and decked out.
  In an investigative study, Julia Stanley theorizes that the source of these varying definitions stems from gender-determined sub-dialects. Homosexuality in America is a “subculture with its own language.” As such, a special vocabulary is developed by its members. Previously, male homosexuals defined dyke as lesbian without derogation. A bull dyke was also defined as a lesbian without further distinction. For female homosexuals of the community, however, a dyke is an extremely masculine, easily identified lesbian, given to indiscretion. Bull dyke is an extension of this term, with the addition of this person described as nasty, obnoxiously aggressive, and overly demonstrative of her hatred of men.
  In an alternative investigation, Susan Krantz discusses the etymology of bulldyke, with derivations of the Middle English "falsehood" for bull and dick for dyke (Farmer and Henley 1891). Therefore, a possible origin for a masculine lesbian comes from bulldicker that could specifically mean "fake penis", denoting a "false man". Further speculation talks of the synonymous term bulldagger. Here, dagger also alludes to the male genitalia and bull referring to "false" rather than "man". The earliest account of dagger in this context stems from an account in 1348 by Henry Knighton.
  In the 1950s, the word dyke was used as a derogatory term by straight people, and by lesbians who were most likely to be able to move up in social class.  The term was meant to identify crude, rough-bar lesbians. In 1971, the poem The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke by Judy Grahn was published by the Women's Press Collective. This use of dyke empowered the lesbian community because heretofore it had only been employed as a condemnation. Because of the exposure of the word to the public, the term dyke was reclaimed by the lesbian community in the 1970s.
caption: Boston Dyke March (2008), Massachusetts, USA.
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