In kennel clubs and veterinary notes, bitch remains the ordinary name for a female dog. Breeders write it on pedigrees without irony. In everyday speech the same noun is among the harshest insults in English, aimed most often at a woman judged cruel, spiteful, or sexually available, and sometimes at a man, a friend, or a situation that will not give way. Those later uses never replaced the animal sense. They piled onto it.
The origin of the word bitch is not a fashionable loan from French or Latin. English already had the noun in the Old English period. The Oxford English Dictionary places first use before 1150; Collins Dictionary of the English Language puts the written record before the year 1000. The meaning then was the female of the dog.
An Old English word, not a medieval import
The Old English form was bicce, also spelled bicge. It was a feminine weak noun: nominative bicce, other cases biccan. The double consonant later palatalized, which is why Modern English has the affricate in bitch rather than a hard k. Middle English spellings wander in the usual way for a common spoken word: bicche, biche, beche, byche, buche, bikk. The Middle English Dictionary treats them as one entry and keeps the canine sense, including the female of the wolf.
American Heritage and Merriam-Webster both take the modern noun back through Middle English bicche to Old English bicce. The OED classifies the word as inherited from Germanic. That classification matters because one widely used etymology handbook has suggested a path through Old Norse. Old Norse did have a close counterpart, bikkja, used of a female dog and sometimes of the female fox or wolf. The English and Norse words belong to the same Germanic cluster. They do not match sound for sound: the Norse form has a palatal glide that Old English bicce lacks. Anatoly Liberman has noted that older dictionaries called the relationship obscure for exactly that reason. A Norse loan into English cannot be ruled out in the abstract, but a native Old English word already in the record is the simpler path, and the historical dictionaries prefer inheritance.
Cognates without a settled ancestor
North Germanic relatives are not in doubt. Norwegian bikkje, Icelandic and Faroese bikkja, Old Danish bikke, and Swedish bycka carry the same animal meaning. Merriam-Webster allows a Germanic noun that varied in final consonant and in inflectional class, and it tentatively sets German Petze and Betze beside that group. Those German forms, however, are recorded only from the fifteenth century, and the consonants do not line up cleanly with English ch. Wiktionary reconstructs Proto-West Germanic bikkja and Proto-Germanic bikjo, then links the noun to a verb meaning to thrust or attack, compared with Dutch bikken, to hack. That deeper step is a reconstruction, not an agreed history. Liberman treats the ultimate source as unknown and rejects a connection with English bicker.
Folk stories that derive the noun from bite, or from a Hebrew word, have no evidence behind them. Jacob Grimm once derived the Norse noun from Saami pittja; the OED remarks that borrowing in the opposite direction is equally possible. French biche, the doe, looks like a cousin on the page. Romance etymologists now take that word from Latin bestia through Old French bisse, so it is not a Germanic sister of bicce.
English therefore inherited a Germanic name for a female dog. What, if anything, that name meant before the Germanic languages diverged remains open.
From kennel to insult
The leap from female dog to abusive label for a woman is attested around 1400. Middle English already used the word contemptuously of women and, in compounds, of men: bicche sone is in the record for son of a bitch. Geoffrey Chaucer's bicched bones, unlucky dice, shows an adjective of general curse that later dictionaries have sometimes hesitated to attach to the noun, though the form is difficult to separate from it.
Around 1500 the noun could be aimed at a man more lightly, as a variant of dog for a fellow. That playful human sense did not become the main one. By the early nineteenth century, slang lexicography treated the word as among the worst things one could call an Englishwoman. The breeding sense stayed technical and unscandalous in the same centuries.
Later English added layers without discarding the old ones. A verb meaning to bungle or spoil appears in the 1820s. To bitch in the sense to complain is recorded from about 1930, perhaps colored by the adjective bitchy and perhaps by the older verb of spoiling. In the twentieth century the noun also named a complaint, a hard problem, or an unforgiving turn of events. In 1906 William James coined bitch goddess for success imagined as a corrupting idol. Prison and sexual slang developed a sense of a submissive person. From the 1930s the word circulated in some gay male speech; later African American vernacular could use it of a man with sexual contempt, transferring the older insult aimed at women. Informal American speech also turned it into a rough vocative for a friend. That last use does not cancel the offensive load in other contexts.
What the consonants still show
The useful fact is the dating, not a moral. Palatalization of Old English geminate k before a front vowel is why speakers say the word with an affricate and not a hard stop. That change is West Germanic history inside English, not a later fashion imported with the insult. The insult itself is medieval. The animal name is older still, already English before the Norman Conquest, and its North Germanic cousins show that the kennel term was shared, even if no Indo-European ancestor can be named with confidence.