The Development of the Word Queer: Before and After LGBTQ+ Reclamation
By Joe Reyes
Humans use words to give objects and realities meanings in order to make sense of the world. Not only do we as humans use words to codify and understand our experiences, but we also use words to wield sociopolitical power over one another. For example, white Americans have used (and still use) the “n” word to describe and dehumanize black Americans. When white Americans use the “n” word, they invoke the centuries of enslavement and marginalization that black Americans have experienced, and as such, also invoke power over black Americans. Similarly, queer has been used as a slur to describe non-heterosexual, non-cisgender people and to demonstrate power over the LGBTQ+ community. Later on, the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed the word queer to use as its own power. However, before queer was used to describe a non-heterosexual person, it began as an adjective, and it also existed in a variety of phrases and compounds. In this paper, I begin with a discussion on the etymology of the word queer as an adjective, which will be followed by examining two of its definitions, as well as compounds that queer appeared in. Then, I unpack the externally-motivated change of queer into a noun in the twentieth century and its etymology. I conclude my paper by detailing the reclamation and present-day uses of the word queer by the LGBTQ+ community.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the origins for the adjective form of queer (meaning no. 1) are uncertain. Queer may have been borrowed from the German word quer, which is an adjective that means “transverse, oblique, crosswise” (OED, queer, adj.2). Queer could also have its origins in the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word *þwerhaz, which means “cross or adverse,” or the Proto-Indo-European word *terk, which means “to turn, twist” (Wiktionary, queer, adj.). These proto-words are also ancestors of the Latin word torqueo, so torqueo may also be related to the word queer. One explanation for queer possibly being related to words such as torqueo is metathesis, or the switching of sounds or letters in a word or phrase. For example, torqueo may have transformed into some variant of queo-tor and then developed into queer. However, despite explanations such as metathesis, the origins of the OED’s first definition of the adjective queer remain uncertain.
Although the OED lists three definitions to the queer adjective (no. 1), for now, I will focus on the first two definitions. I do this because the third definition is related to the development of queer as a noun meaning “homosexual” in the twentieth century. In regards to the first definition, the OED defines queer in its earliest meaning as “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric … of questionable character” (OED, queer, adj.1 1). One of the first documented instances of this meaning of queer is poet Gavin Douglas’ Eneados, a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, although in Douglas’ work, queer is spelled in its Scottish equivalent, queyr (“The cadgear … Calland the colȝear ane knaif and culroun full queyr”). According to the OED, it was not until 1663 in historian James Health’s work, Flagellum, that queer was recorded in its present-day spelling.
OED’s second definition for queer as an adjective is “out of sorts; unwell; faint; giddy” (OED, queer, adj.1 2). Other parts of this definition are “painful” and “drunk”, but those meanings of queer are now obsolete. Queer was first documented in this definition of “unwell; faint” in 1749 in English novelist Mary Collyer’s Letters from Felicia to Charlotte (“I must confess that I was in a very queer situation of mind: I was far from being easy”). These two definitions of queer as “strange” and “out of sorts” appeared in a variety of works, such as novels, diaries, history books, and plays. Although queer can still take on these two definitions today, they are less widely used compared to its popular present-day LGBTQ+ meaning.
In addition to the now rare uses of queer in the previously mentioned definitions, queer also appeared in a few compounds that were popular in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries but are now rare in the twenty-first century. One compound that the OED lists is queer fellow. Queer fellow is a noun meaning “an odd or eccentric person,” and it is primarily used in Irish English or as a term that sailors and other maritime people would use; it is also slang for “a person in command or in charge” (OED, queer, adj.1 C2). Queer fellow in the former meaning can be found in Sir Richard Steele’s daily publication, The Spectator, in 1712. Clearly, queer fellow retains the meaning of queer as “strange, odd,” when it is applied to a noun. However, in regards to its latter meaning, queer fellow also takes on a different meaning in military contexts, which lexicographer Eric Partridge noted in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in 1958. Patridge’s dictionary, as well as other dictionaries defining slang and similar words, are important in documenting words such as queer fellow because they makes note of words that were not documented at first by other dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (“A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English”). The importance of dictionaries documenting unconventional words is also the case with the compound queer street.
A second compound including queer as an adjective is the compound queer street, which the OED cites as first recorded in the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pick Pocket Eloquence. The Lexicon Balatronicum defines queer street as “wrong, improper, contrary to one’s wish,” whereas the OED defines queer street as slang meaning “an imaginary street where people in difficulties (esp. financial ones) are supposed to reside; (hence) the fact of being in a difficult position” (OED, queer, adj.1 C2). As with the OED’s first two definitions of queer as an adjective (no. 1), Queer street and queer fellow were recorded and used long before queer or any of its compounds meant “homosexual” or anything related to the LGBTQ+ community. Although these compounds of queer are still used today, they started decreasing in frequency in the 1950s and are now rare in usage (see Appendix A). Queer fellow’s frequency seems to be increasing in English, but it is nowhere near where its frequency used to be in the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. Undoubtedly, queer as an adjective meaning “strange” and “out of sorts” had some significance in queer’s development as a noun meaning “a homosexual” or homosexuality (OED, queer, n.2) and as an adjective meaning “of a person: homosexual” (OED, queer, adj.2). According to the Key Words Project, “the … ‘strange, odd, peculiar’ [meaning of queer] is still present” when queer is used to denote or describe a homosexual person (“Keyword: Queer” 3). For example, English poet and author Radclyffe Hall used queer to describe her main character Stephen in The Well of Loneliness. In the 1928 novel, not only is Stephen “queer” because of her physical body, interests, and mannerism, but she is also “queer” in that she loves women (“Keyword: Queer” 3). So, queer in this case is used with more than one meaning. Additionally, because homosexuality is a deviation from the heterosexual social norm (“odd, peculiar”) and oftentimes characterized as an “out of sorts” or sinful state by religious institutions and people, queer, with its previous meanings established, could easily be transformed into a noun that meant “homosexual.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were plenty of external forces that motivated queer’s transformation into a noun meaning “homosexual”.
The OED’s first recorded usage of queer as a noun (queer, n.2) records a moment in time when a homophobic culture acted as an external motivation to transform queer into a noun meaning “homosexual.” The OED cites an 1894 letter in which John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, used queer “to describe then Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, whom he suspected was sordidly implicated in his eldest son’s recent and suspicious death” (Crowell 817). To give context to this letter, the 1890s was the period in which Oscar Wilde, a gay Irish writer, published The Picture of Dorian Gray and received an onslaught of homophobic backlash under the guise of literary criticism. Critics described Wilde’s book as “fit for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys;” during that time period, there were scandals arising in which noblemen and telegraph boys were discovered having sex with one another (Luckhurst 4). Because of the dominant homophobic English culture, as well as words such as sodomy being used in the same contexts as queer during this time, queer began developing as a noun to mean “homosexual” in British English. However, as Dr. Ellen Crowell notes in her article “Queer,” queer was not strictly used to describe someone who is homosexual in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century because its “solidification into [a] homosexual slur happened slowly … [due to its] multivariant slipperiness” (Crowell 817).
As queer developed into a noun and adjective meaning “homosexual” in British English, American media outlets and writers followed suit and started using queer to mean “homosexual,” oftentimes in a derogatory sense. One of the first recorded usages of queer in American English is in the Los Angeles Times. On November 19, 1914, the daily newspaper reported “that the Ninety-six Club was the best; that it was composed of the ‘queer’ people...” (OED, queer, adj.2). A Dazed Digital article notes that in the twentieth century, American newspapers and people used queer specifically as a derogatory term to “attack effeminate gay men,” whereas “in Britain, the Oxford Dictionary differentiated between using [queer] as an adjective and a verb” (Hall 4). Appendix B demonstrates how writers of American English took the increasingly popular queer from British English and used it more frequently from 1890 to around 1925. Considering this and the distinction made between American English and British English in the Dazed article, it seems that Americans may have used queer as a pejorative to disparage LGBTQ+-identifying people (at the time, specifically gay men) more frequently than those in the U.K. Queer began appearing in American dictionaries in the 1900s. For example, “the 1965 printing of Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition lists “queer,” noun and adjective, as slang for homosexual” (Perlman 5). Queer continued to be used as a derogatory term until the 1980s and early 1990s.
In the 1980s, the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit America and disproportionally affected gay men. However, the American government, as well as American newspapers and magazine, called HIV/AIDS a “gay disease” and “God’s divine vengeance to the gay community” (Bausum 84). There were no governmental measurements to address this public health issue. In response, gay rights activists came together and organized groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation. These activist groups reclaimed queer as a self-identifying label, and in doing so “’they have disarmed the homophobes,’ Newsweek wrote in 1991” (Perlman 6). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHDEL) further describes that this reclamation not only was “semantically overturned by members of the maligned group” but further recaptured as a “term of defiant pride” (AHDEL, “queer”). Appendix B demonstrates the effect of the LGBTQ+ community’s reclamation of queer, as the word skyrocketed in usage in both American and British English after 1990.
Another reason for this massive increase in frequency of queer in the 1990s and 2000s is the development of queer as an adjective “noting or relating to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms” (OED, queer, adj.1 3). Since LGBTQ+ activists and organizations reclaimed queer for themselves, queer “has expanded beyond meaning only “homosexual” … [and] does not have a single meaning” (Perlman 7). Queer could mean a non-cisgender identity, such as genderqueer and non-binary. Queer could also include someone questioning their sexual and/or gender identity. In sum, queer has come to be “an umbrella term that included gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people,” and other marginalized sexual and gender identities (AHDEL, “queer”). Some have even used queer to describe the LGBTQ+ community as the queer community. However, even though more people are becoming comfortable with queer (as a word) and adopting queer as a label for themselves, queer still holds a history of hurt in its meaning and has the potential to be a hurtful attack for LGBTQ+-identifying people.
Dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Urban Dictionary do include some of the same definitions of queer as the OED, but go further than the OED and define queer more expansively in sexual and gender identities. For example, Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MW) lists queer as an adjective: “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female” (MW, “queer”, adj.2 d). The Urban Dictionary (UD) is also incredibly expansive in defining queer; for instance, it defines queer as “an identity used because some individuals whose gender or sex is non-conforming may not have an easy way to culturally identify their sexual orientation” (UD, “queer”). These dictionaries are expansive in that they include previous OED definitions of queer and add some of their own definitions, and they continue to stress that queer is still considered a derogatory word, depending on its speaker and the context. As such, in the present-day, queer is mainly associated with the LGBTQ+ community and marginalized sexual and gender identities.
Works Cited
“A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 Sept. 2019, 19:21 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Slang_and_Unconventional_English, Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Crowell, Ellen. “Queer.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3-4, 2019, pp. 816-820., doi:10.1017/S106015031800092X.
“Google Ngram Viewer.” Google Books, Google, https://books.google.com/ngrams. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Hall, Jake. “Tracing The History Of The Word ‘Queer’.” Dazed Digital, 28 Jul. 2016, https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/32213/1/tracing-the-history-of -the-word-queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Keyword: Queer.” Keywords Project, University of Pittsburgh, [2011-2016?], https://keywords.pitt.edu/keywords_defined/queer.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Lockhurst, Roger. “Perversion and Degeneracy in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians, British Library, 15 May 2014. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/perversion-and- degeneracy-in-the- picture-of-dorian-gray. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Perlman, Merrill. “How The Word ‘Queer’ Was Adopted By The LGBTQ Community.” Columbia Journalism Review, 22 Jan. 2019, https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/queer.php. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019, https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” Urban Dictionary, 2011. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” Wiktionary: The Free Dictionary, Wikimedia Foundation, 31 Oct. 2019, 04:17 (UTC) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer, adj.1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/156236. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer, n.2.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/156235. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Humans use words to give objects and realities meanings in order to make sense of the world. Not only do we as humans use words to codify and understand our experiences, but we also use words to wield sociopolitical power over one another. For example, white Americans have used (and still use) the “n” word to describe and dehumanize black Americans. When white Americans use the “n” word, they invoke the centuries of enslavement and marginalization that black Americans have experienced, and as such, also invoke power over black Americans. Similarly, queer has been used as a slur to describe non-heterosexual, non-cisgender people and to demonstrate power over the LGBTQ+ community. Later on, the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed the word queer to use as its own power. However, before queer was used to describe a non-heterosexual person, it began as an adjective, and it also existed in a variety of phrases and compounds. In this paper, I begin with a discussion on the etymology of the word queer as an adjective, which will be followed by examining two of its definitions, as well as compounds that queer appeared in. Then, I unpack the externally-motivated change of queer into a noun in the twentieth century and its etymology. I conclude my paper by detailing the reclamation and present-day uses of the word queer by the LGBTQ+ community.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the origins for the adjective form of queer (meaning no. 1) are uncertain. Queer may have been borrowed from the German word quer, which is an adjective that means “transverse, oblique, crosswise” (OED, queer, adj.2). Queer could also have its origins in the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word *þwerhaz, which means “cross or adverse,” or the Proto-Indo-European word *terk, which means “to turn, twist” (Wiktionary, queer, adj.). These proto-words are also ancestors of the Latin word torqueo, so torqueo may also be related to the word queer. One explanation for queer possibly being related to words such as torqueo is metathesis, or the switching of sounds or letters in a word or phrase. For example, torqueo may have transformed into some variant of queo-tor and then developed into queer. However, despite explanations such as metathesis, the origins of the OED’s first definition of the adjective queer remain uncertain.
Although the OED lists three definitions to the queer adjective (no. 1), for now, I will focus on the first two definitions. I do this because the third definition is related to the development of queer as a noun meaning “homosexual” in the twentieth century. In regards to the first definition, the OED defines queer in its earliest meaning as “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric … of questionable character” (OED, queer, adj.1 1). One of the first documented instances of this meaning of queer is poet Gavin Douglas’ Eneados, a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, although in Douglas’ work, queer is spelled in its Scottish equivalent, queyr (“The cadgear … Calland the colȝear ane knaif and culroun full queyr”). According to the OED, it was not until 1663 in historian James Health’s work, Flagellum, that queer was recorded in its present-day spelling.
OED’s second definition for queer as an adjective is “out of sorts; unwell; faint; giddy” (OED, queer, adj.1 2). Other parts of this definition are “painful” and “drunk”, but those meanings of queer are now obsolete. Queer was first documented in this definition of “unwell; faint” in 1749 in English novelist Mary Collyer’s Letters from Felicia to Charlotte (“I must confess that I was in a very queer situation of mind: I was far from being easy”). These two definitions of queer as “strange” and “out of sorts” appeared in a variety of works, such as novels, diaries, history books, and plays. Although queer can still take on these two definitions today, they are less widely used compared to its popular present-day LGBTQ+ meaning.
In addition to the now rare uses of queer in the previously mentioned definitions, queer also appeared in a few compounds that were popular in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries but are now rare in the twenty-first century. One compound that the OED lists is queer fellow. Queer fellow is a noun meaning “an odd or eccentric person,” and it is primarily used in Irish English or as a term that sailors and other maritime people would use; it is also slang for “a person in command or in charge” (OED, queer, adj.1 C2). Queer fellow in the former meaning can be found in Sir Richard Steele’s daily publication, The Spectator, in 1712. Clearly, queer fellow retains the meaning of queer as “strange, odd,” when it is applied to a noun. However, in regards to its latter meaning, queer fellow also takes on a different meaning in military contexts, which lexicographer Eric Partridge noted in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in 1958. Patridge’s dictionary, as well as other dictionaries defining slang and similar words, are important in documenting words such as queer fellow because they makes note of words that were not documented at first by other dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (“A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English”). The importance of dictionaries documenting unconventional words is also the case with the compound queer street.
A second compound including queer as an adjective is the compound queer street, which the OED cites as first recorded in the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pick Pocket Eloquence. The Lexicon Balatronicum defines queer street as “wrong, improper, contrary to one’s wish,” whereas the OED defines queer street as slang meaning “an imaginary street where people in difficulties (esp. financial ones) are supposed to reside; (hence) the fact of being in a difficult position” (OED, queer, adj.1 C2). As with the OED’s first two definitions of queer as an adjective (no. 1), Queer street and queer fellow were recorded and used long before queer or any of its compounds meant “homosexual” or anything related to the LGBTQ+ community. Although these compounds of queer are still used today, they started decreasing in frequency in the 1950s and are now rare in usage (see Appendix A). Queer fellow’s frequency seems to be increasing in English, but it is nowhere near where its frequency used to be in the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. Undoubtedly, queer as an adjective meaning “strange” and “out of sorts” had some significance in queer’s development as a noun meaning “a homosexual” or homosexuality (OED, queer, n.2) and as an adjective meaning “of a person: homosexual” (OED, queer, adj.2). According to the Key Words Project, “the … ‘strange, odd, peculiar’ [meaning of queer] is still present” when queer is used to denote or describe a homosexual person (“Keyword: Queer” 3). For example, English poet and author Radclyffe Hall used queer to describe her main character Stephen in The Well of Loneliness. In the 1928 novel, not only is Stephen “queer” because of her physical body, interests, and mannerism, but she is also “queer” in that she loves women (“Keyword: Queer” 3). So, queer in this case is used with more than one meaning. Additionally, because homosexuality is a deviation from the heterosexual social norm (“odd, peculiar”) and oftentimes characterized as an “out of sorts” or sinful state by religious institutions and people, queer, with its previous meanings established, could easily be transformed into a noun that meant “homosexual.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were plenty of external forces that motivated queer’s transformation into a noun meaning “homosexual”.
The OED’s first recorded usage of queer as a noun (queer, n.2) records a moment in time when a homophobic culture acted as an external motivation to transform queer into a noun meaning “homosexual.” The OED cites an 1894 letter in which John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, used queer “to describe then Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, whom he suspected was sordidly implicated in his eldest son’s recent and suspicious death” (Crowell 817). To give context to this letter, the 1890s was the period in which Oscar Wilde, a gay Irish writer, published The Picture of Dorian Gray and received an onslaught of homophobic backlash under the guise of literary criticism. Critics described Wilde’s book as “fit for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys;” during that time period, there were scandals arising in which noblemen and telegraph boys were discovered having sex with one another (Luckhurst 4). Because of the dominant homophobic English culture, as well as words such as sodomy being used in the same contexts as queer during this time, queer began developing as a noun to mean “homosexual” in British English. However, as Dr. Ellen Crowell notes in her article “Queer,” queer was not strictly used to describe someone who is homosexual in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century because its “solidification into [a] homosexual slur happened slowly … [due to its] multivariant slipperiness” (Crowell 817).
As queer developed into a noun and adjective meaning “homosexual” in British English, American media outlets and writers followed suit and started using queer to mean “homosexual,” oftentimes in a derogatory sense. One of the first recorded usages of queer in American English is in the Los Angeles Times. On November 19, 1914, the daily newspaper reported “that the Ninety-six Club was the best; that it was composed of the ‘queer’ people...” (OED, queer, adj.2). A Dazed Digital article notes that in the twentieth century, American newspapers and people used queer specifically as a derogatory term to “attack effeminate gay men,” whereas “in Britain, the Oxford Dictionary differentiated between using [queer] as an adjective and a verb” (Hall 4). Appendix B demonstrates how writers of American English took the increasingly popular queer from British English and used it more frequently from 1890 to around 1925. Considering this and the distinction made between American English and British English in the Dazed article, it seems that Americans may have used queer as a pejorative to disparage LGBTQ+-identifying people (at the time, specifically gay men) more frequently than those in the U.K. Queer began appearing in American dictionaries in the 1900s. For example, “the 1965 printing of Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition lists “queer,” noun and adjective, as slang for homosexual” (Perlman 5). Queer continued to be used as a derogatory term until the 1980s and early 1990s.
In the 1980s, the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit America and disproportionally affected gay men. However, the American government, as well as American newspapers and magazine, called HIV/AIDS a “gay disease” and “God’s divine vengeance to the gay community” (Bausum 84). There were no governmental measurements to address this public health issue. In response, gay rights activists came together and organized groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation. These activist groups reclaimed queer as a self-identifying label, and in doing so “’they have disarmed the homophobes,’ Newsweek wrote in 1991” (Perlman 6). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHDEL) further describes that this reclamation not only was “semantically overturned by members of the maligned group” but further recaptured as a “term of defiant pride” (AHDEL, “queer”). Appendix B demonstrates the effect of the LGBTQ+ community’s reclamation of queer, as the word skyrocketed in usage in both American and British English after 1990.
Another reason for this massive increase in frequency of queer in the 1990s and 2000s is the development of queer as an adjective “noting or relating to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms” (OED, queer, adj.1 3). Since LGBTQ+ activists and organizations reclaimed queer for themselves, queer “has expanded beyond meaning only “homosexual” … [and] does not have a single meaning” (Perlman 7). Queer could mean a non-cisgender identity, such as genderqueer and non-binary. Queer could also include someone questioning their sexual and/or gender identity. In sum, queer has come to be “an umbrella term that included gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people,” and other marginalized sexual and gender identities (AHDEL, “queer”). Some have even used queer to describe the LGBTQ+ community as the queer community. However, even though more people are becoming comfortable with queer (as a word) and adopting queer as a label for themselves, queer still holds a history of hurt in its meaning and has the potential to be a hurtful attack for LGBTQ+-identifying people.
Dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Urban Dictionary do include some of the same definitions of queer as the OED, but go further than the OED and define queer more expansively in sexual and gender identities. For example, Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MW) lists queer as an adjective: “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female” (MW, “queer”, adj.2 d). The Urban Dictionary (UD) is also incredibly expansive in defining queer; for instance, it defines queer as “an identity used because some individuals whose gender or sex is non-conforming may not have an easy way to culturally identify their sexual orientation” (UD, “queer”). These dictionaries are expansive in that they include previous OED definitions of queer and add some of their own definitions, and they continue to stress that queer is still considered a derogatory word, depending on its speaker and the context. As such, in the present-day, queer is mainly associated with the LGBTQ+ community and marginalized sexual and gender identities.
Works Cited
“A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 Sept. 2019, 19:21 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Slang_and_Unconventional_English, Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Crowell, Ellen. “Queer.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3-4, 2019, pp. 816-820., doi:10.1017/S106015031800092X.
“Google Ngram Viewer.” Google Books, Google, https://books.google.com/ngrams. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Hall, Jake. “Tracing The History Of The Word ‘Queer’.” Dazed Digital, 28 Jul. 2016, https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/32213/1/tracing-the-history-of -the-word-queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Keyword: Queer.” Keywords Project, University of Pittsburgh, [2011-2016?], https://keywords.pitt.edu/keywords_defined/queer.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Lockhurst, Roger. “Perversion and Degeneracy in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians, British Library, 15 May 2014. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/perversion-and- degeneracy-in-the- picture-of-dorian-gray. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Perlman, Merrill. “How The Word ‘Queer’ Was Adopted By The LGBTQ Community.” Columbia Journalism Review, 22 Jan. 2019, https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/queer.php. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019, https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” Urban Dictionary, 2011. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer.” Wiktionary: The Free Dictionary, Wikimedia Foundation, 31 Oct. 2019, 04:17 (UTC) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/queer. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer, adj.1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/156236. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
“Queer, n.2.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/156235. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Appendix A
Appendix B |
Pictured Left Above: Taken from Google Ngram Viewer. The frequency of queer fellow and queer street plotted on a graph from 1700 to 2008. The graph demonstrates the popularity of queer fellow and queer street from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.
Pictured Left Below: Taken from Google Ngram Viewer (Both “Queer” and “queer” are used due to case sensitivity; the “Queer” graphs are placed first – see the top two images). The graphs demonstrate the frequency of queer used in American English and British English. For the most part, the frequencies follow the same trends, with the exception of queer being used more frequently in American English than British English from 1890 to about 1925. |