Utah outcasts

—->> Define a word. We dare you.

Cuck is shortened from cuckold, a term that has been used to belittle the “husband of an unfaithful wife” since the 1200s. The word cuckold derives from a French word for the cuckoo bird. Just as the female cuckoo lays eggs in other birds’ nests, a cuckold’s wife sleeps in another man’s bed.

In online message boards like 4chan over the 2010s, cuck slang developed racist and misogynistic undertones. Cuck porn describes a genre of pornography featuring white husbands watching their wives have sex with black men. The implication? This guy is so weak he can’t do anything to stop her and so submissive he even observes the act.

While it’s unclear exactly who coined it and when, cuck eventually blended with conservative, making cuckservative. The term first appeared on Twitter in 2010, when it was used as a hashtag. This spread among white nationalists online as they used cuckservative against conservative politicians who they felt were too sympathetic or accommodating to mainstream, inclusive, and pro-minority policies.

Cuck saw its day though during the 2016 US presidential election. In August, 2015, The New York Times reported that the hashtag “#cuckservative” peaked during the GOP debates, when many social-media users slammed Republican candidates who had “veered too far to the left.” By 2016, internet users were commonly shortening cuckservative back to cuck because who doesn’t like to abbreviate. Even members of the American Dialect Society recognized the words, nominating them for their 2016 Word of the Year in a category called “WTF.”