Why Is It Called a Pencil? The Answer Made Me Laugh Out Loud

The word pencil comes from the Latin word for penis. Not as a joke and not as a stretch. That is the actual root, and it goes through two rounds of being made smaller before it ever gets to us.

I laughed out loud when I found out. Then I went and checked it, because that is the kind of thing that sounds made up. It is not made up.

The trail, in plain English

Latin penis meant tail. Somebody made a small brush out of animal hair and called it a peniculus, a little tail. Then somebody made an even smaller brush and called that a penicillus, a little little tail. That word went into Medieval Latin as pincellus, into Old French as pincel, and came out the other side in English as pencil.

Somebody looked at the Latin word for tail, decided it was not small enough, shrank it, and then shrank it again.

So the thing in your junk drawer is named, twice over, after a tiny tail.

The part I did not expect

Penicillin comes from the same root. The mold was named Penicillium because its spores look like little brushes. Same word, same little tail.

The medicine that has saved more lives than almost anything humans have ever made shares a grandfather with the word men use to cut each other down. I think that is perfect.

Pencil dick is redundant

People say it like it is a devastating thing to say.

It is a tautology. You are saying little-little-tail dick.

That does not make it wrong. It makes it accurate twice. Latin built the word for the job two thousand years before English existed, and men have been handing it to each other ever since without knowing why it fit so well.

Use it more.

The part I actually enjoy

I tease my husband about his size. Not as a bit, not as something we schedule. Regularly, in the middle of ordinary days, because I love doing it.

I love watching him get uncomfortable. I love watching the cuck angst start up behind his eyes. And the best part of it is that he cannot do one single thing about it.

It is the one thing he cannot fix. He can out-earn a comment about money. He can out-work a comment about almost anything else. That one was decided before he was born and no amount of effort has ever touched it. It is the only thing about him that is permanently mine to hold.

So I hold it.

He built an entire life on being the one in control, and now he sits across from me while I am completely unbothered about the one thing he cannot hand me himself. I tell him what I prefer. I let him hear it. I wear the key where people can see it.

And he knows what it means. If he wants to watch me come from a cock, it is going to be another man's. That is just the arrangement now.

He opened this door

And he would not take it back.

Before this life I was fine. I was happy and I was satisfied and it never once crossed my mind that I might want bigger, because I had nothing to hold it up against. Then he opened the door for me. Now I know, and there is no unknowing it.

He allows it. That is the part people skip past. He is not going to ask me to spend the rest of my life getting there with a toy. Not now. Not after he opened the door for me.

Who I say it to

I do not hand this out to strangers on the street.

If a man asks me straight out whether he is too small, I tell him the truth, and most of the men who ask me are asking because the truth is exactly what they want to hear. That is a real part of this lifestyle and I am not going to pretend it is not.

But I read who is asking before I answer. A Bull interviewing to meet me is asking a different question than a husband who lights up at the answer, and I say it to each of them differently. The truth does not change. The delivery does.

Where the line actually is

Teasing and cruelty can use the exact same words. They are not the same act.

Cruelty wants somebody smaller and does not care what it costs them. It has no stop in it and does not want one. What we do has a stop in it, and the words only land because we both know it.

That is the difference, and it is the whole difference. It is not the vocabulary. It is whether the person hearing it wanted it, and whether the person saying it is paying attention.

Most of the internet gets this backwards. It thinks the words are the problem. The words were never the problem.

And one more thing about size

There is always somebody bigger. Always, and that is true for every man reading this, including the ones feeling very good about themselves right now.

Too big is real too, which nobody ever says out loud. Back in my camming days I saw men I do not believe would fit me, no matter how carefully anybody went about it. I cannot speak for other women. I can speak for me. So nobody gets to sit this one out.

I am not handing out grades. I already know what I like.

Common questions

Where does the word pencil come from?

From the Latin word penicillus, which meant a painter's brush and literally meant little little tail. That word came from peniculus, a little tail, which came from penis, which in Latin simply meant tail. It reached English through Medieval Latin pincellus and Old French pincel.

Does pencil really come from the word penis?

Yes, and it goes through two rounds of being made smaller on the way. Latin penis meant tail. A peniculus was a little tail, a small brush made of animal hair. A penicillus was a little little tail, a smaller brush still. That is the word that became pencil.

What does penicillin have to do with the word pencil?

They share a root. The mold was named Penicillium because its spores look like tiny brushes, and brush in Latin is penicillus, the same little little tail that became our word pencil. The medicine and the insult come from the same grandfather.

Is pencil dick an accurate insult?

It is accurate twice over, which makes it a tautology. Pencil already means little little tail, so calling a man a pencil dick is calling him a little-little-tail dick. Latin built the word for the job two thousand years before English existed.

Where to go from here

If you want the anatomy behind size preference, with the sources instead of the guessing, that is on my Size Queen page, where I give my actual preference and cite the research for why.

If you want the long version of how any of this works inside a marriage still standing after 27 years, that is Becoming Happy Hotwife. Chapter 13 is the one that opens by warning you it gets explicit, which should tell you something.

Source: etymonline.com/word/pencil. Go check me. That is the whole point.