Arse

Origin of: Arse

Arse

Arse was originally an ordinary, everyday word in Anglo-Saxon times for buttocks but which became obsolete in polite usage by the 18th century. In America, during the 19th century, arse began to be pronounced as ‘ass’ and indeed the American spelling of ‘ass’ instead arse was adopted and retained from around the mid-19th century onwards. Both the British ‘arse’ and the North American ‘ass’ are used in a number of slang and mainly impolite expressions and it would be tedious to list them all. In many such expressions, the words ‘arse’ and ‘ass’ are often interchangeable, but this is not always the case. For example, in British English ‘a silly arse’ is a mild expletive to describe a silly or foolish person, whereas in American English, ‘a silly ass’ is more likely to describe a person as a silly ass, as in donkey rather than a posterior.