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The sexual orientation meaning of the word gay has become so predominant that people hesitate to use the term in its original senses of “merry, lively” and “bright or showy.” But the word's association with sexuality is not new. The word gay has had various senses dealing with sexual conduct since the 17th century. A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, a gay house a brothel. This sexual world included gay men too, and gay as an adjective in the sexual meaning goes back at least to the late 1930s. After World War II, as social attitudes toward sexuality began to change, gay was applied openly by gay men to themselves, first as an adjective and later as a noun. It is no longer considered slang. Today, the noun often designates only gay men and is usually used as a collective plural: gays and lesbians. How do gays feel about this? But usage as a singular noun is usually perceived as insulting. It has been argued that gay in the sense “awkward, stupid, or bad” is independent of the sexual sense, and therefore not homophobic. This argument is weakened by the fact that the sexual meaning has long been the dominant one, and thus permeates all usages of gay. See also homosexual .