Why ‘the Coed’ Vanished From Campus Language

Where are the coeds of yesteryear?

Colleges used to be filled with them. Throughout the past two centuries, in fact, college after college that had never had coeds before suddenly was populated with them.

But ask a current college student — at least, the ones I recently asked — if they know the word coed, and they say yes: coed basketball, coed dorms, and the like.

Right. But have they ever met a person called a coed? Their answer is a puzzled — What? No, they haven’t. They are astonished when I say it’s a word that used to mean a female student.

Nevertheless, I say, there was a time when a female student at a coeducational college could be called a coed. But why?

Good question. The answer, I think, has to do with the sweeping shift in our country during the 19th and 20th centuries from single-sex colleges and universities to coeducational ones. As late as 1835 there were no coeducational colleges in the United States, and hence no coeds. The number of coeducational colleges has increased ever since; today only about three dozen single-sex institutions remain out of nearly 5,000 colleges and universities. That makes practically all female students coeds nowadays. Except that nobody bothers to call them that anymore.

Coed, of course, comes from coeducation, for which the Oxford English Dictionary provides as its earliest citation an 1852 article in the Pennsylvania School Journal that begins: “Co-education of the sexes,” and continues, “The instruction of males and females in the same class is supposed by many to be an evil.”

For its earliest evidence of coed meaning a female college student, the OED offers an 1893 dictionary entry and then this 1903 item from a publication called the Independent: “Any college where the girls are commonly called ‘co-eds’ is not a truly co-educational institution.”

The OED also cites a 1928 reference from the Morning Post about “ultra-modern American universities, where ‘co-eds’ abound.” And none other than W.H Auden used it in a 1951 poem: “Enormous novels by co-eds/ Rain down on our defenceless heads.”

To me coed seems slangy, but to my surprise I find that it’s not in slang dictionaries like Lighter’s or Green’s. Instead, it shows up in usage guides. Merriam-Webster’s authoritative Concise Dictionary of English Usage simply says coed was formerly acceptable but is now in disfavor.

Why? Well, first of all, the word coed by itself does not suggest anything female. Like coeducational, with that initial “co” it’s as gender-neutral as can be. Somebody decided to use it for females, but it could just as plausibly have been applied to males — or even more appropriately, to students of all genders attending a coeducational college.

And then there’s the way coed was often used. Coeds, at least as portrayed in the media, seemed to be less serious about education, and more interested in distracting men. For example, in 1940 the first ever homecoming queen at Penn State was given the title “Penn State’s Perfect Coed.”

Here are a few more examples, from recent publications looking back on days gone by:

“Lila stood before Daniel, separated only by the thin table. Her hand sweated as she held out his slender book, feeling elated, a grad student again, younger, completely unveiled. ‘Thanks for coming.’ Unlike the last time they’d been this close, he was serene, sober. ‘My pleasure. You killed,’ tumbled out of her mouth, as if she were still his coed.” —Susan Shapiro, What’s Never Said, 2016.

“A lot of the series was shot in their apartment — say, in front of a bookcase, where a white-bloused Sherman would affect the impending-doom gaze of a B-movie coed.” —Cathy Horyn, The Real Cindy Sherman, Harper’s Bazaar, 2012.

“One of his students, a precocious coed who had the hots for him, said he had a grin that made a girl just want to cuddle and snuggle with him. He had shied away from her after that, as well as several others whose interests were more for the instructor than the course. It wasn’t that he didn’t like aggressive women; he did. But ‘Betty Coeds’ were hardly women as far as he was concerned. They were little more than girls, all giggles and Pepsodent smiles.” —Fern Michaels, Balancing Act, 2013.

“Approaching 70, Marigold was no longer the willowy coed of 1964.” —Paul di Filippo, I’ll Follow the Sun, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, 2014.

By no means all instances of coed are like these, but there are enough to make clear that the word doesn’t belong in our age of Title IX.