effeminate

The Latin verb effeminare means to make into a woman, and it was not a neutral description. It was built from ex- (out of, away from) and femina (woman), and in classical Roman usage it described a man who had abandoned the qualities Rome associated with citizenship and military virtue. Cicero used effeminatus to attack political opponents. The word was a weapon.

The root femina traces to a Proto-Indo-European base meaning to suckle or nurse, which also produced the Latin felare (to suck) and the Greek thele (nipple). Femina in Rome referred to women as those who could nurse; it was a biological category before it was a social one. When Latin speakers coined effeminare, they pulled that biological term into a moral argument about what men should be.

The word entered Middle English around the 1440s, borrowed directly from Latin effeminatus. English writers used it initially in religious and philosophical contexts to criticize men judged too devoted to comfort, luxury, or physical pleasure. Thomas More, writing in the early 16th century, deployed it freely. The moral weight of the word was heavier than any description of behavior.

By the 17th and 18th centuries, effeminate had acquired a more specific social meaning in English, describing men whose speech, dress, or mannerisms were judged insufficiently masculine by current convention. What counted as effeminate shifted with each generation. Samuel Johnson defined it in his 1755 Dictionary simply as womanish, unmanly, voluptuous, tender, delicate. The definition revealed more about Johnson's world than about any fixed quality.