Nymphomania
/ˌnɪmfəˈmeɪniə/noun
An old and now discarded diagnosis of excessive sexual desire in women.
The Greek roots
Literally: “bride madness”
The story of the word
Bienville's treatise of 1771 gave the term currency in French and English had it within a few years, at a period when medicine treated female desire as a disease of the womb. νύμφη in Greek is a bride or a young woman, and also a minor goddess of springs and trees; anatomists of the same century used the Latin plural nymphae for the labia minora, which is the route by which the word became clinical. Entomology took it too, calling an insect's intermediate stage a nymph.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → New Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
In a sentence
Nymphomania appears in nineteenth-century case notes far more often than any modern diagnosis would allow.
The word survives as an insult long after it stopped being a diagnosis.