Twat

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Twat is a vulgar term for the human vagina, which can also be used as a derogatory epithet. In British English, it is often pronounced with a short a (to rhyme with bat). In other areas (eg. Australia and New Zealand) it is also pronounced with a short "o" sound (to rhyme with hot) and this was common in British English usage in the past.

Robert Browning famously misused the term in his 1841 poem Pippa Passes, believing it to be an item of nun's clothing:

Then owls and bats

Cowls and twats

Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry

Its meaning was in reality the same then as now, Browning's misconception probably having arisen from a line in a 1660 satirical poem, Vanity of Vanities:

They talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat

They'd send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat

Another mistaken (or perhaps dialectal) use was in Lord Lytton's 1870 science fiction novel The Coming Race, in an apparent satire on Darwin:

Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this is notably recorded: "Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father of your race was a 'twat' (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops itself in exalting you."

A more contemporary usage (but still early to appear in commercial print) was in Henry Miller's 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer. The novel, widely banned by censors, contains the line, "A man with something between his legs that could... make her grab that bushy twat of hers with both hands and rub it joyfully."

Although the term was not notable enough to be included in George Carlin's original seven dirty words, it was one of four words (the others being fart, dick and turd) that later made his slightly expanded 11-word version. The term may be an inherently funny word, as it is prone to wordplay, a common example being the dirty pun, "twat did you say? I cunt hear you." Another well-used joke has an airplane passenger on Trans World Airlines suggesting to a coffee-bearing flight attendant that he would rather sample her "TWA Tea". More recently, bloggers and internet pundits have used the word as a parodic acronym for "The War Against Terror". Sometimes in the telecommunications industry a TWT is pronounced "Twat", but usually not in the presence of females or supervision.

It is sometimes combined with the synonym cunt, to form "twunt".

The term is more commonly used to indicate the following:

A fool
One who behaves in a childish, extroverted manner
To hit something (or someone) really hard - 'I twatted him one'
To become drunk or otherwise intoxicated - 'Let's get twatted'

There is an urban legend that "twat" is a term for a gravid goldfish.

In South African English, the word gwat is used instead of twat; however this has fallen into disuse.

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