Gropecunt, the earliest known use of which is in about , appears to have been derived as a compound of the words grope and cunt. Streets with that name were often in the busiest parts of medieval towns and cities, and at least one appears to have been an important thoroughfare. Although the name was once common throughout England, changes in attitude resulted in its replacement by more innocuous versions such as Grape Lane. A variation of Gropecunt was last recorded as a street name in There were once many such street names in England, but all have now been bowdlerised.
The first record of the word grope being used in the sense of sexual touching appears in ; cunt has been used to describe the vulva since at least , and corresponds to the Old Norse kunta , although its precise etymology is uncertain.
Under its entry for the word cunt , the Oxford English Dictionary reports that a street was listed as Gropecuntlane in about , the first appearance of that name. It was normal practice for medieval street names to reflect their function, or the economic activity taking place within them especially the commodities available for sale , hence the frequency of names such as The Shambles , Silver Street, Fish Street, and Swinegate pork butchers in cities with a medieval history.
Prostitution may well have been a normal aspect of medieval urban life; [7] in A survey of London John Stow describes Love Lane as "so called of Wantons". The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word cunt as "The female external genital organs" and notes "Its currency is restricted in the manner of other taboo-words: see the small-type note s.
FUCK v. In The Miller's Tale , Geoffrey Chaucer writes "And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" and intimately he caught her by her crotch , [10] and Philotus mentions "put doun thy hand and graip hir cunt.
