how did the term "broads! originate [usa]?

Question

and is there any connection with Broadway
ie:who is that Broad sitting on her own over there?
and broadway a musical or show,on broadway .

Answer 1

Broad was first used in less refined circles, as a deregatory term for prostitute (a woman who was broad-minded and broad in morals). Later, it came to be used for uneducated women or women of lower classes.

After a while, it was soon used in popular places.

Most notable is Frank Sinatra's use of the term as a synonym for woman.

Answer 2

The word broad [broads] has been used in USA for most of the 20th century and was popular esp. after WW-One.

Frank Sinatra used the word and it was still popular in the 1960s and 70s but slowly died out.

Broad [broads] comes from "broad in the beam", a seafaring expression to described a boat or ship with a broad beam. [The width of the boat or ship].

It is likely therefore that the word 'broad' became common slang among seafaring folk of America to mean a woman or girl.

A woman's hips are usually broader than that of a man.

Broad.

Possibly the oldest English slang word for a woman is 'fish' - which was widely used in England in the Middle Ages. It is still used to some extent today, but mostly in the Gay Community.

Just to add one more totally useless word to your slang vocabulary; the word 'naff' actually comes from Gay slang of the 1940s and 50s. A version of slang called Polarie or some such. A mix of words and back-slang and words made up from the initial letters of words in a sentence.

Naff [often used instead of the F word as in naff-off or it's naff] comes from the initial letters of the words "not available for *******", meaning a 'straight man' in a gay bar. Naff - so now you know.

By the way, if you want lots of swear words, see if you can find a copy of anything by Jeffrey Chaucer in the original Middle English. Talk about effin' and blindin' - almost every other word is a modern day swear word, but probably not perceived as such back then.

Answer 3

A broad concensus is difficult to find. That said Broads and Broadway have only a broad connection. Almost every English colonoal town or city had a 'Broad Way,' a Main Street or Front Street, one can find examples of Broadway in New England and Ohio and as far west as Minnesotta.

Here is Word Origins for the tangled tale how braod language can be. Suffice it to say it started with a Playing Card and the Image of Two Queens, a great pair to have in a Poker Game ("I've got a couple of broads the odds are with me")...

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/199/
""Dave Wilton, Saturday, April 08, 2006
Where did this slang word for woman come from? It comes from a broad being a playing card. This may sound absurd on the face of it, but if you follow the development of slang uses of broad it all becomes clear.

Broad is an 18th century slang term for a playing card, especially one used in three card monte. This usage may refer to style of playing deck. In modern card decks, a bridge deck has narrower cards than are found in a poker deck. If this variation in card size is older (I know words, not cards), then a broad could be a reference to this larger cut of cards. From George Parker’s 1781 A View of Society:

Black-Legs, who live by the Broads* and the Turf [...] *Cant for cards.


By the 20th century this sense of broad had expanded to include tickets of admission and transportation. From Field’s Watch Yourself of 1912:

Fix the olly! I gave him broads to the show!

And from Jackson & Hellyer’s 1914 A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang:

“Beating the broads” is corrupting the conductor or other collecting functionaire of a transportation line.

At about the same time, the term is recorded to mean a prostitute. Also from Jackson & Hellyer:

Broad, Noun Current amongst genteel grafters chiefly. A female confederate; a female companion, a woman of loose morals. Broad is derived from the far-fetched metaphor of "meal ticket," signifying a female provider for a pimp, from the fanciful correspondence of a meal ticket to a railroad or other ticket.

If the meal ticket connection is too much for you, the sense could have jumped from three card monte to woman. The goal of that game is to pick the queen from among three cards, and broad could have transferred from the card, to the queen, to women.

The general sense of broad meaning a woman, as opposed to the specific one of prostitute, is cited from 1911, from the September issue of Hampton’s Magazine:

Pretty soon what is technically known as a “broad"—"broad" being the latest New Yorkese—hove into sight.

Although this general sense is cited three years earlier than the prostitution sense, it is likely that the prostitution sense is older since the earliest citations of that are in slang dictionaries, meaning the term was around for a while before the lexicographers got hold of it.

(Source: Historical Dictionary of American Slang; New Partridge Dictionary of Slang) ""
Peace

Answer 4

A broad should be broad where a broad should be broad

South Pacific

Answer 5

Possibly derived from the old Norse word "brod" (pronounced "broad" ) meaning "bride." Makes more sense than any other explanation I have heard.

Answer 6

According to Dictionary.com:

Slang extension to meaning "woman" (1911) may be suggestive of broad hips, but it also may trace to Amer.Eng. "abroadwife", for a woman away from her husband, often a slave. Earliest use suggests immorality or coarse, low-class women.

Answer 7

"women should be obscene and not heard"

groucho marx.