Etymologies of erotica and pornography  

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This page features the etymologies of erotica (17c) and pornography (19c).

Etymology of erotica

• Erotic (1621)

1621 (implied in erotical), from Fr. érotique, from Gk. erotikos, from eros (gen. erotos) "sexual love".

• Erotica (1820)

from Gk. neut. pl. of erotikos "amatory," from eros; originally a booksellers' catalogue heading.

--Douglas Harper via [1], May 2005

Etymology of pornography

History of erotic depictions#The modern concept of pornography

The term pornography is derived from Ancient Greek pornē (prostitute) + graphō (I write ). Strangely enough, the term is a hapax legomenon (i. e. it is found only once in Ancient Greek literature), in the Deipnosophistae by Athenaeus who refers to a group of painters of courtesans as pornographoi, painters of prostitutes.

The full fragment reads:

"You, you teacher of love, are in no respect better than Amasis of Elis, whom Theophrastus, in his treatise On Love, says was extraordinarily addicted to amatory pursuits. And a man will not be much out who calls you a pornographer [πορνογράφος], just as they call Aristeides and Pausanias and Nicophanes painters [ζωγράφοι]. And Polemon mentions them, as painting these subjects exceedingly well, in his treatise On the Pictures at Sicyon." --Deipnosophistae[2]

The terms pornographer, pornography and porn were not attested before the 1850s in the English language, though it had been used in the French language by Restif de la Bretonne in his 1769 social reform pamphlet Le Pornographe, a tract to reform prostitution.

Restif did not use the term in its current sense of depiction of people having sex.

The first time the word pornography was used in its current meaning (as the result of a depiction) was by French bibliographer Gabriel Peignot in his Dictionnaire des livres condamnés au feu (1802 - 1806) in which he speaks of book which are "sotadiques ou pornographiques".

In the German work by Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (1830) by Karl Otfried Müller and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, the concepts pornography, rhyparography (from rhypos, filth) and rhopography are used. It will be translated to English in 1850 as Ancient Art and its Remains; or a Manual of the Archeology of Art.

But the first appearance of the word pornography in English print is in William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1842), which -- again -- distinguishes between rhyparography, pornography and all the lower classes of art:

"Pornography, or obscene painting, which in the time of the Romans was practised with the grossest license (Pproper., ii, 6 Sueton., Tib., 43, and Vit. Hor.), prevailed especially at no particular period in Greece, but was apparently tolerated to a considerable extent at all times. Parrhasius, Aristides, Pausanias, Nicophanes, Chaerephanes, Arellius, and a few other πορνογράϕοι are mentioned as having made themselves notorious for this species of license."[3] with added corrections, see also [4]

Smith also refers to the first and only instance of the word pornographoi in the Deipnosophistae. Paul Lacroix in his Histoire de la prostitution (1851-1852) also quotes its author Athenaeus.

The first traceable instance of the use of the term pornography as an expletive is in the essay "La littérature putride" (1868), directed against Émile Zola and other naturalist writers.

In Italy, the word pornographic in the sense of a 'depiction of' dates at least from the time of the "Raccolta pornografica", a subsection in the Catalogo del Museo Nazionale di Napoli (1866).

See also: whore dialogues

See also

• Erotica vs. pornography debate