Bill Temple
Active Member
- May 20, 2021
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All words for prostitute (ie "a person who engages in sexual activity with another in exchange for compensation"), including the word "prostitute" itself, have been applied to promiscuous women at some point and with varying prevalence. Where I grew up, I often heard girls referring to other girls as prostitutes when they clearly weren't actual paid sex workers.I have to disagree with that, to me a women who sleeps around and does not get paid for it is a whore, a women who gets paid for sex is a hooker/prostitute, it might be a mater of semantics but I do believe there is a difference between the two.
Your particular distinction between a whore and a hooker is your own. It's probably informed by how and when you first learned the words and in which cases your childhood friends used the words to disparage women, but there's nothing even remotely resembling a consensus on which word means "promiscuous woman" and which one refers to a sex worker engaging in prostitution.