Late Middle English: contraction of housewife (the original sense); the current sense dates from the mid 17th century.

• ‘You brazen hussy!’ is now the sort of thing someone might call a female friend as a joke, but until the mid 20th century hussy was a serious term for an immoral woman. The original hussy was far more respectable, though—she was a housewife. Hussy developed in the mid 16th century from housewife (Middle English), which was the word's first meaning. Some hundred years later it became a rude or playful way of addressing a woman, and also a derogatory term implying a lack of morals.