The words homosexual and heterosexual are invented words, mixing the Greek homos and hetero (meaning same and different) and the Latin sexus (meaning gender). The first time the words appear was in 1869 when the Hungarian doctor Karl-Maria Kertbeny anonymously published a pamphlet in German which he stated his opposition to an anti-sodomy law in Germany, proposing that consensual sexual acts in private should not be subject to criminal law. He divided people’s sexual orientation into three categories: heterosexual, homosexual and monosexual.
This was the first time these words were used. A few years later in his seminal work, Richard von Krafft-Ebing carried over the terms homosexual and heterosexual into what was one of the masterworks on sexual practises Psychopathia Sexualis. The book was a bestseller, taking the words into standard usage, as well as popularising the words masochism and sadism. The word entered the English vocabulary with the translation from German of the academic work into English by C. G. Chaddock, an American in London and Paris, who later introduced Babinski’s sign to the United States. But that is another story.
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