Sir

What is Sir?

Sir is a form of address for the leading party in a power exchange, taken into Dutch untranslated from English. The word sets down what you call someone, not what happens. In the leather tradition Sir is also a title that is earned, with its own contests and with boy as its fixed counterpart.

How Sir sounds in practice

Sir is a word you say out loud, and that is the whole mechanism. As long as no one says it, nothing changes.

A common arrangement is small and sharply bounded: from the moment the door closes until the moment there is coffee on the table, he is Sir and she goes by her name. Outside that window no one says it. What happens inside that window, from a conversation to a session with rope, stands apart from it.

That also makes Sir a cheap test. Anyone unsure whether she wants to place herself under someone’s lead needs to arrange nothing about pain or nakedness to notice what one word does. The same test is on Meester, where the outcome turns out different for many Dutch speakers.

Where the word Sir comes from

From the Latin word for “older”. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives sir around 1300 as a variant of sire that at first stood only in an unstressed spot in the sentence, and by the middle of the fourteenth century widened into a polite form of address for anyone. Sire itself comes around 1200 from Old French sire “lord”, from Vulgar Latin *seior, from Latin senior “older, elder”. That same dictionary adds a sentence you rarely see in an etymology: “It is not an acronym of anything.”

Dutch got the word too, only in the other form. The Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands gives sire as a loan from French, with attestations from 1599 and the meaning “form of address of a monarch”. With us it stayed in the palace. The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal does not know sir at all and the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek has no entry on it. Anyone who says Sir in Dutch is saying an English word.

Why people say Sir

Because it is a threshold you cross yourself. With Master comes a story about ownership; with Sir comes nothing more than the granting of rank, and for many people that is enough to start with.

• For the one who says it, the gain is in the transition. You hear yourself use a word you never use, and with that the role switch is marked without anything having happened to your body.
• For the one who receives it, Sir works as an instruction to themselves, because the title is audible the whole evening.
• For two people together, it gives a handle by which the role can go on and off without a conversation.

What a title does not do is make someone suitable. Saying Sir to someone who is not paying attention only makes the disappointment more formal. What a leading party does need to be able to do is on dominant.

Sir as a leather title

In the leather world Sir is not a form of address you hand out but a title won on a stage. The organization behind International LeatherSIR, Leatherboy and Community Bootblack describes itself as a family of thirteen regional contests in North America, each of which sends a LeatherSIR, a Leatherboy, and a Community Bootblack to the international final.

The titles descend from the discontinued contests International Mr Drummer and International Drummerboy, and the organization itself says they are expressly about sex. That shows in the five judged parts: interview and image, a speech, formal image, jockstrap, and a fantasy scene. That last one sets these contests apart from the formats of International Mr. Leather and Mid-Atlantic Leather.

Of the three titles, only the Bootblack contest is, by the organization’s own words, open to all genders. That is the same skew that showed up on girl against boy: at the top of this tradition stands one word, and it is a man’s word.

What Sir is not

“Sir is an abbreviation.” No. Etymonline adds that sentence itself, and the word is simply an unstressed form of sire.

“Sir means the same as Meester.” They stand beside each other and they sound different. Meester carries the man at the front of the class in Dutch, Master mainly names a position in an M/s relationship, and Sir says the least of the three: only that there is rank.

“Sir is a BDSM word.” No dictionary finds that. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which does carry the scene meaning of top, gives at Sir a cross-reference to Mr and nothing more.

What I see myself

I am Victor, a gigolo and psychotherapist, and Sir is not even on my own list. Meneer is, and it makes me happy; Meester is not, I find it sounds harsh. Sir I hear almost never in the Netherlands, and when it does come up, it is with women who learned their BDSM in English.

What I see is that the word stumbles more often than the role. Someone wants to give up the lead and has no trouble with that at all, until she has to say Sir and something sticks in her throat. That is not hesitation about the role. That is an English word in a Dutch mouth.

So I never ask “do you want to call me Sir”, but “what do you want to say when you want to ask something”. That gets a usable answer.

What you can do yourself

• Say Sir out loud once before you agree to it. A title you have never said sounds different in your head than in the room.
• State when the title applies and when it does not, with a beginning and an end that are both identifiable.
• Choose a fallback word before you need it. Meneer, U, or a name do the same work, and switching is then a choice and not a failure.
• Never let Sir take the place of the agreements. What does and does not happen, and which word stops everything, you agree separately; see safeword.

More reading on Sir

Within this glossary, Meester gives the Dutch side of the same question. Beyond it, the Online Etymology Dictionary is nice to open yourself, because it sets sir and sire side by side and shows how one word went two ways in two languages.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to try out what a title does to you without a whole session standing around it right away, that is perfectly possible. The page on the BDSM date sets out what we go over beforehand, and the form of address is one of the things you fill in yourself there.

Sources

• sir (n.), sire (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, consulted 10 August 2026. Provides the dating of sir to c. 1300 as a variant of sire originally used only in an unstressed spot; the widening into a respectful form of address by the middle of the fourteenth century and the later use without regard to rank; the plain statement “It is not an acronym of anything”; and at sire the origin from Old French sire “lord (appellation), sire, my lord”, from Vulgar Latin *seior, from Latin senior “older, elder”.
• sire. Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim and N. van der Sijs, 2003-2009) via Etymologiebank, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Provides that the Dutch sire “form of address for a king”, like English sir, is borrowed from French sire, with the Early Modern Dutch attestation “Sire Fransoys Draeck Ridder” in Van Meteren [1599], the royal form of address in “wat zegt gy hierop, Sire?” [1644] and an attestation from [1808]; plus the development from Vulgar Latin *seior, a contracted nominative form of senior “superior, older”.
• WNT, query sir. Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal via the Integrated Language Database of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, 10 August 2026. Provides zero results and zero hits: the WNT has no entry sir. The Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek of the same institute gives on the same day “sorry, dit artikel staat (nog) niet in het ANW”.
• query sir. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 10 August 2026. Provides thirty-one results, of which the entry Sir, n. consists solely of the cross-reference “see Mr n.”, the entry on honorifics in compounds. So there is no independent slang or scene meaning of Sir in this dictionary, while that same dictionary does carry a sadomasochistic meaning at top.
• The ILSb-ICBB Journey. International LeatherSIR, Leatherboy and Community Bootblack, own website, consulted through the Internet Archive’s web archive on 10 August 2026 because the live site no longer returns anything. Provides that the family consists of thirteen regional contests in North America that each send a LeatherSIR, a Leatherboy, and a Community Bootblack; that International LeatherSIR and Leatherboy are erotic titles that came out of the discontinued contests International Mr Drummer and International Drummerboy; the five judged parts “Interview and Personal Image; Speech; Formal Personal Image; Jock Strap (Physique); and a Fantasy Sex Scene”; the finding that it is that fantasy scene which sets these contests apart from the formats of International Mr. Leather and Mid-Atlantic Leather; and the line that the Community Bootblack contest “is open to all genders”, which is absent from the two other titles. A party writing about itself, used here only for facts about its own contest.

Related terms

Sir is the form of address for the role described on dominant; the word says what you call someone, the role says what that someone does.

• Meester. The Dutch word for the same place, with a schoolteacher stubbornly sounding through it.
• Master. The English title that goes further and names a relationship instead of a form of address.
• Dom. The shortest and most neutral word in this set, and the most used.
• Protocol. The agreements about posture and address that a title is usually part of.