When did the term pegging first appear in print and who coined it?
Executive summary
The sexual slang sense of "pegging" — a person (commonly a woman) using a strap‑on dildo to anally penetrate a man — entered popular English in 2001 after a naming contest run by sex columnist Dan Savage in his Savage Love column, where "pegging" won popular adoption [1] [2]. Linguistically, the word "pegging" has far older attestations in English for unrelated senses (e.g., fastening, knitting, climbing) going back to the early 17th century, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary [3] [4].
1. The coinage of the sexual sense: a 2001 crowdsourced label
The clearest, most widely reported origin for the sexual meaning of "pegging" is Dan Savage’s 2001 Savage Love contest to name the act of a woman anally penetrating a man with a strap‑on; Savage solicited reader votes between proposed names (including "bob" and "punt") and the winning entry—"pegging"—quickly propagated through his column and readership [1] [2]. Multiple contemporary accounts and later summaries identify Savage as the originator of the modern sexual sense and the contest as the mechanism by which the word entered mainstream sex‑advice discourse [5] [6].
2. The practice precedes the term by decades
Reporting and scholarship emphasize that the sexual practice itself predates Savage’s neologism by many years: pornographic material and sex‑education media depicted or taught strap‑on anal penetration prior to 2001, notably the 1976 film The Opening of Misty Beethoven and the 1998 instructional video series Bend Over Boyfriend, which circulated in workshops and helped popularize the act though without a standardized label [2]. Writers including Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence used phrases like "strap‑on sex" in the Bend Over Boyfriend context, showing the activity existed and was discussed before the new slang settled in [2].
3. The older lexical history: pegging in nonsexual senses
Dictionary evidence shows "pegging" already existed in English centuries earlier in nonsexual senses — for example, as the gerund of "peg" meaning to fasten or score, and in other technical usages; the Oxford English Dictionary traces earliest examples for pegging and pegged to writings as early as 1611 (Randle Cotgrave) and lists multiple senses, some now obsolete [3] [4]. This is an important linguistic caveat: the word itself is not new in English, but its application to the strap‑on sexual practice is recent and culturally specific [3].
4. How the new meaning stuck and why it matters
After Savage’s contest, "pegging" rapidly entered sex education, journalism and online discourse as the succinct label for the practice, a trajectory documented in reference articles and sex‑advice summaries; by the 2010s the term had become the dominant everyday label in mainstream outlets [2] [6]. The adoption mattered because it filled a lexical gap—public discussion, search behavior, and media references coalesced around one short term—though some critics and queer voices have argued that the label centers heteronormative frames and marginalizes alternative terms like "strap‑on sex" [7] [5].
5. Remaining limits in the record and competing claims
Sources converge on Savage’s 2001 role in popularizing the sexual sense, and some word‑history sites offer anecdotal backstories (for example, etymological jokes about "peg boys") that Savage and readers referenced when proposing the word, but there is no primary printed citation in the provided sources showing the exact Savage Love column text or the formal vote tally; available summaries and secondary reporting consistently attribute coinage to Savage’s contest mechanism rather than to an earlier printed usage of the sexual sense [1] [2] [5]. The OED’s much older attestations show the lexical root is old, but they do not document the modern sexual meaning — a distinction that explains why journalists call Savage the coiner even while dictionaries record centuries‑old examples of the base word [3].