A bigot is a person who is prejudiced and intolerant. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as referring to “a fanatical adherent or believer; a person characterised by obstinate, intolerant, or strongly partisan beliefs; a person considered to adhere unreasonably or obstinately to a particular religious belief, practice, etc.” The term is often used particularly with reference to holders of certain types of strong religious belief.
As is so often the case, the etymology of this word is not entirely certain, except that it is widely believed to be a borrowing into English of the originally French word bigot, which seems to have meant “religious hypocrite”.
One suggestion is that the French word itself came originally from exclamations similar to “by God!” as used by English or Norman or other Germanic-language-speaking soldiers fighting in France (bearing in mind that the Normans themselves had originally been speakers of Old Danish before shifting to French). The typical use of bigot in Old French seems to have been as a derogatory nickname used by the French for the Normans, because of their frequent use of a Germanic oath which was something like bi Gott.
The earliest evidence for the term bigot in written English comes from 1598 in the writings of Thomas Speght, who was a schoolmaster from Yorkshire and a well-respected editor of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
The family name Bigott or Bigod, which could well have had the same source, first started appearing in Normandy, as well as in England, from the 11th century. The first Norman Earl of Norfolk was called Hugh Bigod or Bigot. He was born in Leicestershire in 1095 and died in 1175 in Palestine at the age of 80 while on a Crusade; he was buried in Thetford in Norfolk.
We can readily believe that this explanation of the word’s origin in an oath might well be valid because we know of other similar instances. The English were certainly known to the French as les goddams during the Hundred Years war, which lasted very approximately from 1340 to 1450 and was fought mainly in what is now northern France. Similarly, during the first world war (1914-18), American soldiers serving in France were widely known over there as les sommobiches, the French having been struck by how frequently the American soldiers swore using the phrase “son of a bitch”.
It is interesting that this phrase itself is a term of abuse of some antiquity, appearing in English as early as the 1300s in the variant form of bitch-son, which looks like a borrowing from the Viking Age Old Norse Sturlaugr Saga, where we find the term bikkjusonr.
The word bitch “female dog” is a genuinely Old English word, even if one whose origin is also not well understood. We do believe that it is related to Old Icelandic and Faroese bikkja, Old Swedish bicka, and Old Danish bikke, all meaning “bitch”; but beyond that we know very little. It seems not to have any cognates in other related languages. But no less an authority than Jacob Grimm suggested that bikkja came into Old Norse from a variety of the Lappish language of the Vikings’ Sami neighbours in far northern Scandinavia, where pittja was the word for a female dog.
JACOB GRIMM
Jacob Grimm and his brother, Wilhelm, were the editors of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The first edition came out in 1812, with an English translation appearing in 1823. Jacob was also the philologist who formulated Grimm’s Law, which established a set of regular correspondences between certain Germanic consonants and those in other Indo-European languages.
