Bitch, literally meaning a female dog, is a common slang term in the English language, especially used as a denigrating term applied to a person, commonly a woman. It often refers to someone who is belligerent, unreasonable, malicious, rudely intrusive, and/or aggressive.

Its original use as a vulgarism, documented to the fourteenth century, suggested high sexual desire in a woman, comparable to a dog in heat. The range of meanings has expanded in modern usage. In a feminist context, it can indicate a strong or assertive woman, one who might make men feel threatened. When applied to a man, bitch is a derogatory term for a subordinate.

The term “bitch” comes from the 1150^{[citation needed]} word bicche, which was developed from the Old English word bicce. It also may have been derived from the Old Norse word bikkja for “female dog.” The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term meaning “female dog” to around 1000 A.D.^[1]

As a derogatory term for women, it has been in use since the fourteenth^[2] or fifteenth century.^[1] Its earliest slang meaning mainly referred to sexual behavior, according to the English language historian Geoffrey Hughes:^[3]

The early applications were to a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat. Herein lies the original point of the powerful insult son of a bitch, found as biche sone ca. 1330 in Arthur and Merlin… while in a spirited exchange in the Chester Play (ca. 1400) a character demands: “Whom callest thou queine, skabde bitch?” (“Who are you calling a whore, you miserable bitch?”).

“Bitch” remained a strong insult through the nineteenth century. The entry in Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue(1785) reads :

A she dog, or doggess; the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billinsgate or St Giles answer–“I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch.