After that he often called Mary the closet tribade.

" Tribade seeks fellow travellers'help out of the closet."

Its usage suggests that it was more colloquial and more pejorative than tribade.

'Do you reckon she's really a closet tribade?'

Champville is fifty; she is slender, well made, has lascivious eyes, she is a tribade, and everything about her proclaims it.

As Jean-Luc Planchais wrote, she is a "bloody tribade who castrates ideals", who "believes herself to be God, the destruction of the other confirms her supremacy. "

The lubricity of this operation, whence, as a thoroughgoing tribade, she expected to mine the greatest pleasure, animated her large dark-brown eyes which, since her youth, had always been extremely handsome.

Fricatrice, a synonym for tribade that also refers to rubbing but has a Latin rather than a Greek root, appeared in English as early as 1605 (in Ben Jonson's Volpone).

Penetration was the focus of concern in all sexual acts, and a woman who was thought to have uncontrollable desires because of her engorged clitoris was called a "tribade" (literally, one who rubs).

In the eighteenth century, where the term saw one of its most popular uses, it was employed in several pornographic libels against Marie Antoinette, who was "tried and roundly convicted in the press" as being a tribade. "