Fireworks! Blast-Off! A sense of heat in her brain! And so on and so forth

Whether as a means of concealing conversations about sex, glorifying the act, or attempting to communicate just how mindblowing the feeling is, euphemisms for orgasm have proliferated through the decades. Some have notable staying power—like “come,” for instance—while others feel inescapably of their time, never to be categorized as anything near sexy again. 

In honor of National Orgasm Day, Feeld has consulted a selection of sex writers and academics about the euphemisms that feel particularly notable to them, and picked a few of our favorites, skimmed from decades of sex manuals, slang dictionaries, and instructive magazine articles. 

Blast-off

Given the phallic form of the rocket ship, maybe it’s to be expected that the space race era would see the advent of an aeronautic-adjacent orgasm euphemism. Per Jonathan Green’s Big Book of Filth, the term was coined in the 1960s. It appears in a number of books of that decade, including Robert Kyle’s 1968 novel Venus Examined and 1969’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) by David Reuben. “After I blast-off myself, what do I need a girlfriend for?” Reuben writes, quoting a patient in the bestselling sex manual. 

“A sense of heat in her brain” 

Rachel Feltman, author of Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex, has 12^th-century nun Hildegard of Bingen to thank for their preferred orgasm euphemism. Hildegard reports the sensation as “a sense of heat in her brain,” in what is now viewed as the first written description of the female orgasm. Out of the hundreds of years worth of sex history research Feltman undertook for their book, Hildegard’s description of orgasm sticks out to Feltman because they also recounted the life of Hilegard on an episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week (one of the two podcasts they host; Science Quickly is the other). “How did a nun know all about orgasms? I think that goes without saying,” Feltman writes to Feeld Magazine by email. “But kudos to Hildegard for not keeping the good news to herself.”

The Big O

No, we’re not talking about Oscar Robertson. Using “The Big O” as a euphemism for orgasm dates back to the 1950s, according to Jonathon Green’s The Big Book of Filth. It’s been used pretty steadily since then, from a 1966 Esquire article that proclaims “the new female status symbol is the orgasm,” a mention in the May/June ’97 issue of SPY,  and appearances in very recent Reddit posts. More often than not, the term is used specifically in situations describing the “elusiveness” of the orgasm. (Or, is it that most written material about orgasms has the express purpose of addressing this elusiveness and “guiding” the reader? Chicken or the egg.) 

Bust a nut 

Spectrum Boutique founder and author of Carnal Knowledge: Sex Education You Didn't Get In School Zoë Ligon likes the phrase “bust a nut” because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. “All the words on their own aren't inherently dirty (bust can mean torso/chest, or basically like "burst" while "nut" can mean...literal nuts) but together they are like, violent but in a fun and immature way,” Ligon tells Feeld Magazine by email, recalling that she first heard it back in middle school when listening to hip hop. “It's just a very goofy-sounding phrase no matter how you say it, although I'm sure plenty of people genuinely do cry out "I'M GONNA BUST A NUT!" unironically...there are billions of people on this planet, after all.” 

La petite mort (or little death) 

Perhaps one of the more pretentious euphemisms for orgasm, the French phrase “la petite mort” took hold for English speakers both in its original form and in translation as “little death.” The phrase has been used for hundreds of years, but as recounted on Dig: A History Podcast’s episode on the term, tracing when exactly it took on the meaning of “orgasm” is a more difficult task. As Ian Frederick Moulton writes in his book Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England, “dying” itself was used as a euphemism and metaphor for orgasm in the Early Modern period. 

Shot

Critic and medieval literature scholar Jo Livingstone points out that euphemisms for male orgasms were “fairly widespread” in Middle English. “Pollucion,” for instance, could mean ejaculation, though it specifically indicated the cultural attitude that cumming without the intent to reproduce was wasteful. By comparison, “shot” was rather neutral. “I love this term because it isn't actually that euphemistic, instead referring to the action of ejaculation rather than its moral qualities,” Livingstone explains by email, pointing out that we still use it in English. “There's a pun going on in a term like "money shot" which blends the motion of semen coming out of the body with the idea of a camera "shooting" the action, which is much more ancient than it seems at first glance.”

The earth moved

You don’t have to be an Ernest Hemingway head to appreciate the delightfully dramatic euphemism for orgasm that he coined in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In one of the book’s sex scenes, Hemingway writes, “For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere […] he felt the earth move out and away from under them.” As a description for orgasm, the term has proved rather resilient, maybe thanks to the fact that it's quite opaque. Its most well-known use, without a doubt, is in Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move,” but it’s popped up all over the place. It’s even proven useful in the laboratory. According to an article in The Times, researchers at the Charles University in Prague studying the orgasm are measuring the scale of the orgasm in degrees of earth movement: it could be a “wave,” “volcano,” or an “avalanche.” 

Ecstasy

Ecstasy and its association with orgasm might seem more contemporary, but in fact, the word was used to mean “orgasm” way back in the early modern period, as University of Michigan professor Dr. Valerie Traub tells Feeld by email. Dr. Traub has written about sex in the early modern period extensively in her books, including The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England and Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. At the time, “epilepsy” was used at the time to describe orgasm, too (respectively spelt “extasie” and “Epilepsie” back then).

Baptism to another life

Dr. Eliecer Crespo-Fernández, a professor at the Universidad de Castilla - La Mancha and the author of Sex in Language, has researched and written about sexual euphemisms at length. Among the many, many euphemisms he’s encountered in his work is the concept of orgasm as “baptism to another life,” which appears in D.H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow. “This is an example of what I called artful X-phemism, a modality of euphemistic naming which provides a fresh insight into the taboo,” Crespo-Fernández tells Feeld Magazine by email. “The semantic disguise relies on a very personal and aesthetic value.”

Fireworks

Crespo-Fernández points out “fireworks” as another euphemism he’s encountered for orgasm in his work. The concept was applied visually in Hays Code era Hollywood, too . “[Sex] had to be suggested obliquely and implied in more subtle ways,” Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin write in America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies. When censorship rules prohibited directors from displaying sex acts on screen, intercutting or following shots of a kiss with fireworks was one way of communicating what the couple was getting up to without being too direct. Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief is just one movie that employs the visual trope.