(About male crotch care, carefully phrased, but still deeply into male crotches, so not to everyone’s taste.
From a morning some time ago, after a pleasant long sleep that ended with a hot sex dream that turned into a sweet romantic dream, from which I awoke feeling especially refreshed. Got to the morning wash-up portion of the program (scrub hands, refresh face, wash crotch); if you take quick whizzes every hour during the night, bedside, then your hands and all of your crotch, from pubes to perineum, need a serious washing (and your damp briefs go into the laundry basket, to be replaced by fresh dry skivvies). Normally the crotch wash is a brisk businesslike affair, pleasing but in no way sensuous — but on this morning my body was singing along with my spirit, and I experienced the cleansing as a delicate, luxurious massage of my guy parts. It was delightful.
I began humming the tune to “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja / Stets lustig heissa hopsasa!” (I find Papageno inspiring) while I went through the routine: pubes and the belly just above them; penis shaft and base; testicles; the clefts on either side of the genitals, alongside the thighs; and the perineum. Along the way, I idly wondered what those clefts — roughly analogous to armpits — were called. When I got to my computer I quickly discovered that the compound thigh pit (analogous to standard armpit and informal elbow pit ‘the inside of the elbow’ and knee pit ‘the back of the knee’; this is the world of paired bodily concavities, or clefts) was moderately common (a few cites below); that crotch pit seemed to be used only for the perineum; and that the noun groin ‘thigh pit’ was also common (a few cites of both groins below).
Then, since there’s a use of the noun groin for the whole area (in kick him in the groin and the like) I went to see what NOAD said about the paired concavities. And was mightily surprised to find that it seemed to maintain that the groin was a spatially discontinuous region of the body, not unlike the nation of Pakistan at the time of the partition of British India into separate nations of India and Pakistan, with Pakistan coming in two widely separated pieces: West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). For the groin, one region, two sides; not two paired bodyparts. This view of the semantics of groin is shared by the Wikipedia entry. But not, it seems, by most speakers.
A careful look at the OED (in an entry still in revision) suggests that it’s the source of the confusion, since it attempts to treat the bodypart noun (in things like along with my armpits, both my groins are sweaty and in need of deodorant) and the body region, or place / location, noun (in things like the glands in my groin, on both sides, are swollen) with just one definition (despite their different semantics and distinct syntax), and mixes examples of both types.
thigh pits. Two (deodorant-focused) examples:
I started putting deodorant in my thigh pits (source)
A shower twice a day, secret clinical strength deodorant for my armpits and whatever heavy antiperspirant would work for my thigh pits (source)
both groins. Three examples:
[Philadelphia Eagles tackle] Lane Johnson: “I feel awesome” after surgery on both groins (source)
Ache in both groins. Started two days ago with intermitent sharpish pain in groins and across the very bottom of my body ie just above the penis (source)
I strained both groins. Couldn’t do power for damn near 2 months (source)
It’s routine in the medical literature:
Bilateral Large Squamous Cell Carcinoma on Both Groins with Metastasis to the Liver: A Case Report (source)
Both groins are prepped with disinfectant and the patient’s whole body is draped with a sterile drape lifted up at the head area for patient comfort (source)
dressing was applied to both groins (source)
The NOAD entries.
noun groin-1: 1 [a] the area between the abdomen and the thigh on either side of the body. [b] informal the region of the genitals: she kicked him in the groin. …
[disregard the noun groin-2: a low wall or sturdy barrier built out into the sea from a beach to check erosion and drifting.]
Compare: axilla (armpit), popliteal fossa (knee pit), cubital fossa (elbow pit) — all of them C[ount] nouns denoting bodyparts. But the area … on either side of the body is sadly unclear, though it’s certainly compatible with the region / location treatment in Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia entry:
In human anatomy, the groin, also known as the inguinal region or iliac region, is the junctional area between the torso and the thigh. The groin is at the front of the body on either side of the pubic tubercle, where the lower part of the abdominal wall meets the thigh.
Explicitly a region / location noun. And then the crucial on either side.
The groin is then in effect the inguinal fossa, except that the word denotes a discontinuous area: you have one groin, not two (as with armpits, knee pits, and elbow pits), one groin with two sides (the left groin is ‘the left side of the groin’, not ‘the left one of the two groins’) — like one Pakistan with two pieces.
The OED entry: starting with the definition:
1.a. The fold or depression on either side of the body between the abdomen and the upper thigh.
The cites come from Middle English on through modern times. At the beginning, groin was clearly a C noun with a plural; then it was also a region / location noun, into which swords are thrust (ouch), which has glands in it, and where you can kick someone. But the two types of cites are mingled indiscriminately, as if they were all instances of the same sort of thing
Singular nouns with spatially discontinuous denotations. Not at all uncommon in the world of technical (especially legal and political) terminology, where such denotations are explicitly stipulated; the referents are technical fictions, and these abound. They are obviously much thinner on the ground in the world of everyday (and implicitly acquired) categories. A spatially discontinuous groin or armpit strikes us as an unnatural referent, as does the two arms treated as unitary entity. So: likely to be rare, but are there any actual examples?
July 24, 2025 at 6:01 am |
It’s not uncommon to hear of an athlete suffering a groin strain, presumably referring to the muscle tissue at the top of the inner thigh. They can take quite a while to heal properly.
July 24, 2025 at 6:27 am |
Yes, meaning ‘a (muscle) strain in the groin’, which could be either sense of groin.