The anatomy is hiding in plain sight: in your pencil case, your flower bed, your guacamole, a Buddhist monastery, a Nottingham courtroom and the complete works of Shakespeare. Every claim on this page is sourced.

Contents: Pencil · Dick · Testify (myth) · Orchid · Avocado · Pillicock · Pizzle · The museum · Bollocks on trial · Mara · Kanamara Matsuri · The missing bone · Catalan footnotes

Penis, pencil and the tail that wagged both

Latin penis originally meant “tail”; the anatomical sense is thought to have developed from it as a metaphor. Its diminutive peniculus meant “brush”, and the diminutive of that, penicillus, meant a painter’s brush or, literally, “little tail”. That word passed through Old French pincel into English as pencil, which first meant a fine artist’s brush in the 14th century and only later the graphite stick in your drawer.

Source: Etymonline: pencil.

Why Richard?

Dick began as a rhyming nickname for Rick, short for Richard, one of the commonest English names. By the 1550s it already meant any “fellow”. The penis sense is first recorded in 1891, in Farmer’s slang dictionary, possibly from British army slang. The “detective” sense turns up in 1908. Every Richard since has had to live with the consequences.

Source: Etymonline: dick.

Myth busted: swearing on your testicles

You may have heard that Romans swore oaths by holding their testicles, which is supposedly why testify and testicle sound alike. Etymonline calls such stories “groundless modern inventions”. The real link is more poetic: Latin testis meant “witness”, and its use for a testicle is usually explained as the organ that bears witness to virility. Testify comes from the “witness” sense and is unlikely to be related to the anatomy at all.

Sources: Etymonline: testify; Etymonline: testis.

Orchid, or “ballockwort”

The orchid takes its name from Greek orkhis, “testicle”, after the shape of the plant’s root. Middle English skipped the Greek and called the plant ballockwort around 1300. The modern spelling with a d only arrived in 1845. Next time someone gives you orchids, you have been given exactly what you think.

Source: Etymonline: orchid.

Avocado

Avocado comes, via Spanish aguacate, from Nahuatl ahuacatl. The Nahuatl word also had a secondary sense of “testicle”, probably because of the fruit’s shape. Note the “probably”: the resemblance is the likely explanation, not a documented one, and the Fellowship has standards.

Source: Etymonline: avocado.

Pillicock, as performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company

Pillicock, an archaic word for the penis, is attested from the early 14th century as pilkoc. Its most famous outing is in King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4, where Edgar, feigning madness on the heath, sings “Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill”. Critics have noted the sound of Lear’s “pelican daughters” a moment earlier suggesting it. It is, in other words, a dick joke in one of the greatest tragedies in the English language.

Sources: Etymonline: pillock; Folger Shakespeare Library, King Lear 3.4; Farmer and Henley, Slang and Its Analogues.

“You bull’s pizzle!”

A pizzle is the penis of an animal, especially a bull, and in particular one dried and used as a whip. The word is recorded from the 1520s, from Low German or Flemish words related to Dutch pees, “sinew”. In Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 2, Scene 4), Falstaff unloads a famous barrage of insults on the skinny Prince Hal, and “you bull’s pizzle” is in the middle of it.

Sources: Etymonline: pizzle; Wikipedia: Pizzle.

The pizzle that started a museum

In 1974, colleagues gave the Icelandic history teacher Sigurður Hjartarson a dried bull’s pizzle as a joke, because he had used one as a cattle whip as a boy. He decided to try collecting a specimen from every mammal species in Iceland. In 1997 he opened the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavík with 62 specimens. It now holds more than 300 and is run by his son. The Fellowship salutes a fellow archivist who took a joke considerably further than we have.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine; Wikipedia: Icelandic Phallological Museum; the museum’s own history page.

Bollocks on trial

In November 1977 the manager of a Virgin Records shop in Nottingham was prosecuted for displaying the Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks. The defence, led by John Mortimer QC, called Professor James Kinsley, head of English at the University of Nottingham. He testified that bollocks was a legitimate Old English word that had once been used for a priest, and that in the album title it meant “nonsense”. A colleague of Mortimer’s later recalled Kinsley adding that early Bible translations used the word for testicles before the King James Version swapped in “stones”. The bench made its disapproval clear, then found the defendant not guilty on all four charges.

Source: Wikipedia: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

Mara: from demon to slang

Japanese mara (魔羅) is a transcription, via Middle Chinese, of Sanskrit Māra: the demon who tried to stop the Buddha reaching enlightenment and who personifies temptation. Buddhist monks began using his name as slang for the penis, the thing most likely to distract a monk from the path. The penis sense is attested in Japanese from the early 800s, in the Nihon Ryōiki.

Sources: Wiktionary: 魔羅; Jisho.

Kanamara Matsuri

Every year on the first Sunday in April, the Kanayama Shrine in Kawasaki, Japan, holds the Kanamara Matsuri. It honours gods of metalworking who are also prayed to for easy childbirth, marital harmony and protection from sexually transmitted infections. The phallus is the theme of everything: decorations, carved vegetables, sweets and a portable shrine carried through the streets. The festival in its current form began in 1969, has become a tourist attraction, and raises money for HIV research.

Source: Wikipedia: Kanamara Matsuri.

The missing bone

Many mammals, including dogs, bears, bats, rodents and most primates, have a penis bone called the baculum. Humans do not. In 2001 a biologist, Scott Gilbert, and a biblical scholar, Ziony Zevit, published a proposal that the Hebrew word in Genesis usually translated as “rib” may be a euphemism for the baculum. On that reading, the creation of Eve is also a story explaining why men lack the bone. It is a hypothesis, not a consensus, but it is a hypothesis that was published in a peer-reviewed genetics journal, which is more than most dick jokes can say.

Source: Wikipedia: Baculum, citing Gilbert and Zevit (2001), American Journal of Medical Genetics.

Two Catalan footnotes

• Cigala, vulgar Catalan for penis, is literally the word for a cicada, from Latin cicada.
• Collons descends from Latin coleus, “sack, scrotum”, and shares that root with Spanish cojones and Portuguese colhão.

Sources: Wiktionary entries for cigala and cojón.

Got an etymology we’ve missed? Send it in with a source. No source, no entry.