Hoorndrager

What is a hoorndrager?

Hoorndrager is the Dutch word for the man whose wife sleeps with someone else. It has been in the dictionaries since 1599, and it was always an insult: the shame fell on him, not on her. Today’s scene uses hoorndrager loosely as a translation of cuckold, and that only covers half of it.

Where the word hoorndrager comes from

From horns that a cheated-on husband was symbolically given. J. de Vries’s Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek records hoorndrager “sedert Kiliaen” as the name for the deceived husband and traces it back to a Greek expression first noted by Artemidorus in the second century AD: kérata tini poieĩn, to put horns on someone. Van Veen and Van der Sijs date the word to 1599 and prefer a different explanation: capons had their cut-off spurs planted in the comb, where they grew on like little horns.

Which of the two is right, no one knows. In his book of proverbs F.A. Stoett already wrote that the origin is “so far unknown,” and noted alongside it that the deceived husband used to be called a koekoek, a cuckoo. That is where the English cuckold hangs. Genootschap Onze Taal points out that the French cocu, a synonym of hoorndrager, is a variant of coucou: cuckoo. Two languages, the same bird. In Dutch the horn won.

Why the word hoorndrager weighs so heavily

Because the scorn did not go to the adulterous wife but to her husband. Maria-Theresia Leuker and Herman Roodenburg describe the hoorndrager of seventeenth-century farces as “the man who knows his wife sleeps with another but simply does nothing about it”. Knowing did not help him. Knowing and doing nothing was the joke itself, and it came with a gesture: two spread fingers above the victim’s head. According to the same authors that gesture is by now as extinct as the insult.

That is why hoorndrager sits uneasily in today’s scene. A man who calls himself a cuckold chooses a role. A man who is called a hoorndrager gets a four-century-old judgment stuck on him. Part of the crowd picks the word up for exactly that reason, because that weight is precisely the arousal. Fine. Only that is a choice, not a translation.

Where this fits on my site

Hoorndrager is a piece of language history; what people look for today is on cuckolding and cuckold. If you want to go further than the word, the page on cuckolding with a professional bull sets out what gets agreed beforehand for an evening with a third person there.

Sources

• “Die dan hare wyven laten afweyen.” Overspel, eer en schande in de zeventiende eeuw. Maria-Theresia Leuker & Herman Roodenburg, in: Gert Hekma & Herman Roodenburg (eds.), Soete minne en helsche boosheit. Seksuele voorstellingen in Nederland, 1300–1850, Nijmegen 1988, pp. 61–84, via DBNL. Supplies the hoorndrager of the farces as the man who knows and does nothing, the names cornutus and koekoek, and the extinct gesture with two spread fingers.
• hoorndrager. Etymologiebank, hosted by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Bundles the standard works: Van Veen & Van der Sijs (1997) with the date 1599 and the capon explanation, De Vries (1971) with “sedert Kiliaen” and the Greek expression kérata tini poieĩn via Artemidorus, and Stoett (1923–1925) with the conclusion that the origin is unknown and the note “formerly also a cuckoo.”
• Iemand (de) hoorns opzetten. Genootschap Onze Taal. Supplies the meaning “to be unfaithful to him” per Van Dale, and the link between the French cocu and coucou, cuckoo.

Related terms

• Cuckolding. The modern practice the word hoorndrager now drifts around, with the numbers alongside it.
• Cuckold. The man who does want it, and how his position differs from that of a hoorndrager.
• Cuckoldress. His partner, who in the old meaning was the one putting the horns on him.
• Compersion. The feeling that had no name in the seventeenth century and that many couples now build the whole thing around.
• Hotwife. The role in which the same situation is lived out without the shame.