Talk:co-ed

Antonyms

Is there a single word antonym of "co-ed?"

"Cloistered" doesn't quite work, but it's as close as I can come off the top of my head. --Stranger 20:38, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

The rest of the world

So, how about a synonyms section, with the way they refer to it in, say, England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, etc.? (Oh, please don't tell me to put it in myself, as English is a second language to me. Hence my asking here.) --70.112.191.41 05:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

This term is actually used all over the English-speaking world, and is not just restricted to the US. Fixing it now. ---> Tooironic 03:55, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Dated?

Co-ed as a term for young woman is dated? Since when? Citation? What word has replaced it?

It's because there aren't many educational institutions which are predominantly male anymore. The first co-ed universities were a really long time ago, and that's the point in history when it made sense to refer to female students as coeds, since they were remarkable merely for being female on a 90% male campus. Using it today implies that college, or even school, is "for men" and women who go to school are just trying to be like men. Also, given that even if you include the military there are actually more female students enrolled in US colleges right now than males, if the word "co-ed" were to have any use today it would logically make sense to use it for male students trying to fit in by joining all those women. Soap (talk) 13:23, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

@Soap The word "co-ed" is clearly used in the sense "young woman" in this video, uploaded June 20, 2017 by someone who is evidently not old, but about 30 in my estimate: Does the Left Hate Free Speech? (Part 2) | ContraPoints at 4:42. (The video is also really worth watching. I found it a couple of days ago and my ignorance of the meaning of this slang term sent me here.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:59, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

It's possible that someone meant the hyphenated form is dated, and it's now usually "coed". Equinox ◑ 21:01, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Maybe, but that's not what Soap says above. Soap's reasoning is fallacious anyway, an argumentum ad etymologiam. Expressions pointedly don't drop out of use just because the conditions that gave rise to them change, quite the opposite in fact. When people use something like "hot coed" today, they probably do not have the origin of the expression in mind. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:16, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

In fact, "hot coeds" brings up quite a bunch of recent hits on Google, from books to films to porn sites, and indeed "coeds porn" (without quotes) brings even more. Or "horny coeds". Yeah, I don't buy it. Maybe the sense "young woman attending college" is dated, but not the general sense "college-age or young woman", so I've removed the "dated" qualification from that one. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:29, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Okay, I think I've figured it out now. Even in the video referred to above (transcript), the term appears to obliquely allude to the genre of porn. Apparently the noun used to mean "female (college) student (originally: at an institution where both male and female students are present)", and eventually bleaching to "college-age woman, young woman", although the association with education (even co-education) still seems to be present, so "college girl" (typically in a mixed-gender environment). It seems that nowadays, the term is really dated and only still familiar because of the porn genre, but not really used anywhere else anymore. And the porn genre is the main reason why the noun has rather specific connotations like "about 18 to 20 years old", "attractive, hot" and "lusty, horny; slutty" (it's also fairly easy to see why the mixed-gender environment is still relevant in the porn genre). It doesn't just bring to mind any kind of young woman, or female (college) student, to native speakers, apparently (even though it is technically just a dated term for a female college student). Of course, being both dated and contemporary slang, this is rather tricky to find out (dictionaries don't generally list slang, let alone connotations, let alone connotations derived from porn), especially considering that not even native speakers are very clear on this, specifically all the semantic change and pop-cultural context involved. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:09, 23 August 2021 (UTC)