First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communities

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First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communities

Postby JadeTheDeer » Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:52 pm

Hello fams,

I'm working on creating a brief history of vore. Would any of y'all happen to know (or know someone who knows) when and where the term vore was first coined? Best guess for me right now is sometime between 1991 and 2000, on a BBS, usenet, yahoo group, or early furry website.

I'm also trying to get information on the earliest vore scenes/communities that were present on the internet, networks prior, and even possibly pre-1980s (if such a community existed).
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby NightRoller » Fri Sep 17, 2021 10:44 pm

You're probably about a good a guesser as I'd be. Likely, the first few forums started just with some people talking privately in DMs and connecting to each other individually by word of mouth, if I were to guess. Either that or somebody made a vore-themed or vore-adjacent website and other people found it and started contacting them.
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby DoubleA » Sat Sep 18, 2021 2:35 am

I can't say I'm very knowledgable on this topic (my involvement with vore began well into the 2010s), but it's something I've taken a passive interest in.

The most prominent early internet vore communities I'm aware of are Big Gulp and FurryMUCK, which both came into existence around 1995 or 1996, although I'm sure small groups and individuals existed long before this.

I did a little walk through the Wayback Machine, and found that online "swallowing community" seems to have exploded onto the web around 1998. Here's some sites which piqued my interest.

  • 1997-04-30 Big Gulp Homepage
    • Possibly the oldest vore-themed website to exist. It doesn't use the word "vore". Hosts archives of "sexual swallowing" stories.
    • They express that there doesn't seem to be much other content on the infant web.
    • However, there is an archive of a lot of GTS/shrinking/swallowing stories from the long-dead alt.sex.fetish.size newsgroup.
    • No discussions, sadly, so it's hard to say if any of those authors ever used the word "vore" or "vorarephilia".
  • 1998-05-04 Big Gulp "Outside Links" page
    • At this point, there's still not many links, but mentions that FurryMUCK (a huge BBS-based furry roleplaying community) has a room called the "Food Chain" which focuses on swallowing.
  • 1998-08-10 VoreTex
    • Official website for the Food Chain room, hosts some vore roleplay logs dated to 1997–1998, which do use the word "vore".
    • Also notably, our very own Strega was there, and is featured in an RP log.
  • 1998-12-06 Big Gulp "Outside Links" page
    • Seemingly the last time the list was updated.

As for when "vore" was first uttered, there's nothing really conclusive here. Based on this alone, if I had to guess, I'd say the terms vore and vorarephilia (some websites of this era call it vor and vorephilia) arose among MUCKers in the furry community some time between 1995–1997. Unfortunately, much of that content is lost to history, and that has been preserved isn't easily searchable (not without downloading gigabytes of compressed data, anyway).
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby Dindu » Sat Sep 18, 2021 1:37 pm

William Levy said that it was just called "cannibalism" before the 90s. He submitted what was basically a vore drawing of a woman with a full belly to Hustler in the early 80s but they rejected it writing "you're one sick puppy".
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby Delphinus » Sat Sep 18, 2021 5:37 pm

Duamutef had a homepage before this one, but I can't remember the URL for it to put it into the wayback machine. I'm amazed that I was able to pull this url out of my brain XD And the snapshots there only go back to 2011, but the site (or at least his old site) was being updated regularly in the mid-00's. https://web.archive.org/web/20110328014 ... om/~duam9/

My explorations of the community started in 2003/4 with Big-Gulp, Duam, and Eka's. Also the name "swallow-soft" for a page is in my brain but I cannot link it with anything substantial.

Here's my contribution to the community: one of the first Eka's memes, The pelican dollar! viewtopic.php?p=154390#p154390 Use it whenever something gets reposted as often as that one .gif of a pelican swallowing another bird!

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As real as a 3 dollar bill could get. I'm beginning to think this could rival a particular pelican. :P

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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby 4ofSwords » Mon Sep 20, 2021 8:15 am

As DoubleA demonstrated, Big Gulp preceded any wide usage of the term that I was aware of, but not by much since Vore-Tex and Vor-Com were around by the late 90's.

The first round of the internet proper (after it exploded out from BBSs and stopped really being University-Focused) didn't revolve around user-generated content; it was all host-generated. You wouldn't have forums like Ekas, or galleries where people could post their own art, unless they were the site administrator. So 'community' as such was a much more limited idea. Email groups, BBSs, chat rooms and the like might very well exist and did foster a bit of community, but there was a lot more centralization, since places like Vore-Tex existed when either the site administrator produced their own content, or people would send it in to them to post.

Web 2.0 (like Eka's) was really the beginning of a large-scale community, and I think 'vore' as a term really took off at the wave-crest of that phenomenon.

William Levy (https://www.deviantart.com/williamlevy) and Strega (https://aryion.com/g4/user/Strega) are the two most active people I'm aware of with the longest history who are also really aware of the oldest reaches of the community; if you're looking to do serious deep dives, there's no better place to start.

Incidentally, as someone who was a Latin major (albeit terrible at it) when the term 'vorarephilia' was gaining acceptance, I still have to protest its uptake. It should definitely be vorephilia. 'Vorare' is the infinitive, which is improper construction, so it made us look (in my opinion) a bit like pretentious, yet ignorant douches.
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby Rancid » Tue Sep 21, 2021 8:09 am

I don't know where the term came from, it's probably in the latin what the meaning is. But I was doing my first vore RPing back in either '99 or 2000, so it's older than 20 years at least.
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby 4ofSwords » Tue Sep 21, 2021 8:20 am

Rancid wrote:I don't know where the term came from, it's probably in the latin what the meaning is.


It's a Latin-Greek mashup: 'Vorare' - 'to eat' in Latin and '-philia' - '-loving' in Greek. Mixing root languages is reasonably common, though, and going full Greek would have been 'phagophila', which would have been a pretty provocative-sounding term, especially in the late 90s.
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby Eupeptic » Fri Nov 10, 2023 2:48 am

Lol necroposting!

I'm about 99% sure the concept was there on FurryMUCK, which I first got on in either the second half of 1991, or some time in 1992. There were a couple of vore-related rooms in there; I remember finding them and not quite understanding the idea at the time. :D I don't remember if they specifically called it "vore", though.

As has been mentioned, Usenet is probably another candidate. alt.fan.furry would probably be the most likely place to look, starting in perhaps the mid to late 80s, or whenever it was new. Google has a Usenet archive but I haven't been able to make it work, lately.

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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby JadeTheDeer » Sat Nov 11, 2023 2:08 am

Eupeptic wrote:Lol necroposting!

I'm about 99% sure the concept was there on FurryMUCK, which I first got on in either the second half of 1991, or some time in 1992. There were a couple of vore-related rooms in there; I remember finding them and not quite understanding the idea at the time. :D I don't remember if they specifically called it "vore", though.

As has been mentioned, Usenet is probably another candidate. alt.fan.furry would probably be the most likely place to look, starting in perhaps the mid to late 80s, or whenever it was new. Google has a Usenet archive but I haven't been able to make it work, lately.

Eupeptic


Hi. OP here. I did collect some additional research past the time of me posting this thread. To summarize the story as best I can: it seems that the term vore was almost definitely coined on the biggulp forums sometime in the mid 1990s (the site itself was founded in 1995, as per the news update here: https://web.archive.org/web/20010619011 ... _news.html .

Vorarephilia was also coined on that site, and the shortened form quickly took hold as the predominant expression for our kink since (probably because 4 letter words are just super popular in general with umbrella kinks: bdsm abdl, etc).

Before that, the community emerged from a hodgepodge of smaller subinterests in macrophile spaces, such as niche usenet groups. During the time previous to the coining of the term, vore content was usually described as 'swallowing'. i.e. vore stories would just be called 'swallowing stories'.


For an exact date, of the people I spoke with:
Llyander told me the first time they say the word vore was in 1998.
Strega gave a date of 1998 as their first encounter with the term and community.
the_Wolf reports finding the biggulp site in 1995, the forum coming online in 1997, and the term being coined sometime shortly after.

And perhaps most illucidating, a single archive.org archive of the biggulp homepage on 1998, showing the word 'vore' being used about 10 times:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981206090 ... links.html

As well, here is the about page for biggulp, captured in the year 2000, but likely not updated since it still uses the original 'swallowing' terminology:
https://web.archive.org/web/20001018114 ... -gulp.html

Also, another page showing an IRC group named 'swallowing' likely predating the vore terminology:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021215233 ... links.html

For fun, feel free to check out the forums on the big gulp site. It's kinda shocking how extremely petty drama-filled and spammy it is. Says a lot about how much modern moderation has improved. Also note they moved boards 3 times before the site went out, so here are links for each version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011025050 ... o=big_gulp
https://web.archive.org/web/20050405231 ... 1100302457
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby Gaira69 » Sun Jan 07, 2024 6:26 pm

foxygrandpa wrote:
Eupeptic wrote:Lol necroposting!
Hi. OP here. I did collect some additional research past the time of me posting this thread. To summarize the story as best I can: it seems that the term vore was almost definitely coined on the biggulp forums sometime in the mid 1990s (the site itself was founded in 1995, as per the news update here: https://web.archive.org/web/20010619011 ... _news.html .

For an exact date, of the people I spoke with:
the_Wolf reports finding the biggulp site in 1995, the forum coming online in 1997, and the term being coined sometime shortly after.

Also, another page showing an IRC group named 'swallowing' likely predating the vore terminology:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021215233 ... links.html


I concur with the_Wolf, I perused Usenet/alt/sex bulletin boards for years and found bondage and socks/stockings but never came across any "swallowing" content. It was likely December of 1995 my surfing on Yahoo search found The Womaneater Website. From there links directed me to The Big Gulp Archive and some other cannibal jungle peril site I forgot the name off, plus a smattering of other small sites that didn't last long. I want to say that the term Voraphilia was around at the time, but Gynophagia and Androphagia were more popular terms or just swallowing. I remember The Womaneater Forum opening up and then The Big Gulp forum. The shorthand of Vore probably popped up on those two forums as people started to shorten Voraphilia when typing. I did a lot of emailing in the early days to talk to people, the forums really expanded the community fast. Unfortunately email limitations back then caused me to have to purge all my earliest emails, so I can't check my records there. Looking at it, I still have a few emails from 1998 and 1999 but looks like everyone either said swallowing or WE (woman eating) or just plain eating. The first email I have that says "(vore) WE movies" is 11 JUL '99, and the fact that it is parentheses suggests we were aware of it, but were pretty much still using WE as our shorthand. Tho later that year I have a message stating what a ghost town The Womaneater Forum was. Looks like when I finally set up my smart group forum dedicated to male soft vore in 2003 I called it ManEating and the previous big male soft vore forum was called MonsterFood2 at the time. That was a nice little tour of memories past.
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby Gaira69 » Sun Jan 07, 2024 7:25 pm

I should also mention I saw emails referencing my Gaira's Womaneater Movie Guide as early as DEC '98. I pretty much called it that to appeal to popular terms for people looking for a list of female victim vore movies. Gary Miller's The Womaneater website was only a few years old and the main forum for soft vore of the female persuasion. Soft male vore was only found at The Big Gulp forum at that time and required a bit of digging. I didn't see any reference to ME (man eating) in any of my earliest emails.

I read a little further on emails and there was an email on 22 SEP '99 titled Voraphilia and the person referred to themselves as a Voraphile. And then further in the future I opened my site on EroticPeril as VoreFilm Productions in JUL of 2004, so only a year later and I was comfortable enough with the word vore to name my company after it....which made more sense since I had been making WE and ME content since 1999.
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Re: First usage of term 'vore' / want members of old communi

Postby PDVore » Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:03 am

I remember hearing the term voraphilia on big gulp around 88 89. I found it a broad term at the time . Didn't think it would stick.....just what I member.
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