Cunnilingus
oral sex on the vulva by a sexual partner
Cunnilingus is an oral sex act consisting of the stimulation of a vulva by using the tongue and lips. The clitoris is the most sexually sensitive part of the vulva, and its stimulation may result in a woman becoming sexually aroused or achieving orgasm.
Cunnilingus can be sexually arousing for participants and may be performed by a sexual partner as foreplay to incite sexual arousal before other sexual activities (such as vaginal or anal intercourse) or as an erotic and physically intimate act on its own. Cunnilingus can be a risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs), but the transmission risk from oral sex, especially of HIV, is significantly lower than for vaginal or anal sex.
Oral sex is often regarded as taboo, but most countries do not have laws which ban the practice. Commonly, heterosexual couples do not regard cunnilingus as affecting the virginity of either partner, while lesbian couples commonly do regard it as a form of virginity loss. People may also have negative feelings or sexual inhibitions about giving or receiving cunnilingus or may refuse to engage in it.
Etymology and terminology
The term cunnilingus is derived from the Latin words for vulva (cunnus) and the verb "to lick" (lingere). There are numerous slang terms for cunnilingus, including "drinking from the furry cup", "carpet munching", and "muff-diving". Additional common slang terms used are "giving lip", "lip service", or "tipping the velvet"; this last is an expression that novelist Sarah Waters claims to have "plucked from the relative obscurity of Victorian porn".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cunnilingus” as oral sex on the vulva by a sexual partner. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as oral sex on the vulva by a sexual partner. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8402. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cunnilingus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.