Other forms: whores
Whore is a coarse and old word for a prostitute. Called her a whore, the whore of Babylon, whoring after.
It is a slur when applied to a person and is avoided in careful writing, where sex worker is the neutral term. It survives in historical and biblical contexts — the whore of Babylon — and as a general insult with no sexual content at all. The verb whore after means to pursue something faithlessly. Note that the word is Old English and once had no necessary insult in it.
1nounwhoreA prostitute, in coarse or old use.
“In Othello, the jealous husband wrongly calls his innocent wife a whore.”
whore is an offensive term.
Old English hore goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning dear or loved, the same root as Latin carus. The insult is entirely a later development.
Proto-Indo-European
*keh₂-
Middle English
hore
English, today
whore
Built from
From Middle English hore. From Middle English hore, from Old English hōre, from Proto-Germanic hōrǭ, from Proto-Indo-European kéh₂ros (“loved”), from keh₂- (“to wish; desire”). Cognate with Dutch hoer, German Hure, Old Norse hóra as well as Sanskrit चारु (“dear”), Latin cārus (“dear, expensive”), and Irish cara (“friend”). The unetymological spelling with wh- superficially denotes a formerly standard pronunciation with an excrescent (such as in whole), but such a form is hardly found in either commentators on Early Modern English pronunciations or records of traditional dialects (which both explicitly mention its rarity or absence), therefore leaving the spelling somewhat inexplicable. However, this may be because such an excrescent was absorbed by a following (as in words with etymological such as whom, two) after it became established in the spelling but before our earliest orthoepic records.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA