Procuring (prostitution)
facilitation or provision of prostitute
Procuring, pimping, or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute or other sex worker in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer. A procurer, often called a pimp if male, or a procuress, often called a madam if female, or a brothel keeper, is an agent for prostitutes who collects part of their earnings. The procurer may receive this money in return for advertising services, physical protection, or for providing and possibly monopolizing a location where the prostitute may solicit clients. Like prostitution, the legality of certain actions of a madam or a pimp varies from one region to the next.
Examples of procuring include: helping to support trafficking a person into a country for the purpose of soliciting sex; operating a business where prostitution occurs; transporting a prostitute to the location of their arrangement; and deriving financial gain from the prostitution of another.
Etymology
Procurer
The term procurer derives from the French procureur.
Pimping
The word pimp first appeared in English in 1600, in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man out of his Humor. It is of unknown origin, though there are several hypotheses about its etymology. Pimp used as a verb, meaning to act as a pimp, first appeared around 1640 in Philip Massinger's play, The Bashful Lover. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term was commonly used to refer to informers.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Procuring (prostitution)” is facilitation or provision of prostitute. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Procuring, prostitution and facilitation, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q43437. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1600 and 1640.
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This entry incorporates text from “Procuring (prostitution)” 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.