queer
Definitions
General English
Slang
- noun (a person who is) homosexual. Until the 19th century queer denoted odd or curious, as it still does in standard English. Its use as first a euphemism, then a slang synonym for homosexual arose between the world wars, probably first in the USA. Queer ultimately derives from quer, a German word meaning crooked or awry. In the mid-1980s gay activists began to use the term to refer to themselves, in keeping with the trend among ‘transgressive’ minorities to appropriate the language of their oppressors (as in the earlier case of nigger).
Origin & History of “queer”
Queer was probably borrowed
from German
quer ‘across, oblique’, hence ‘perverse’.
this went
back to a prehistoric Indo-European *
twerk-,
which also produced
English thwart and Latin
torquēre ‘twist’ (
source of English
torch, torture, etc).
