It is commonly believed that the term 'missionary position' arose in connection with English-speaking Christian missionaries, who supposedly encouraged the sexual position in new converts in the colonial era.[8] However, the term probably originated from Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male through a confluence of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of historical documents.[9][10] The French refer to it as the 'classical' position. Tuscans refer to the position as 'the Angelic position', while some Arabic-speaking groups call it 'the manner of serpents.'[11]

Before the release of Kinsey's work, the missionary position was known by several names, including 'the matrimonial', 'the Mama-Papa position', 'the English-American position', and 'the male superior position'.[12] In 1948, Kinsey published the male volume of the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He described the American preference for the position and called it "the English-American position". Discussing Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, Kinsey wrote, "It will be recalled that Malinowski (1929) records the nearly universal use of a totally different position among the Trobrianders ... [and] ... that caricatures of the English-American position are performed around ... campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the 'missionary position.'"[12] To date, lexicographers and sexologists have not found use of the term 'missionary position' before Kinsey.[13]

In 2001, Robert Priest examined the origins of the term and concluded that Kinsey had confused several factors in accidentally coining the term.[12] First, according to Malinowski, Trobrianders played and sang mocking songs under the full moon, and not around a campfire. In Sexual Behaviors, Kinsey wrote that the Trobrianders mocked face-to-face man-on-top woman-below intercourse, but does not give context. He mentioned that the position was learned from "white traders, planters, or officials", but does not discuss missionaries. Kinsey also recalled that the medieval Catholic Church taught the position, and upon seeing the natives mocking it, assumed that missionaries had taught it to them. Finally, Malinowski wrote that he saw an engaged Trobriand couple holding hands and leaning against each other, which the natives described as misinari si bubunela — the 'missionary fashion'. Upon accidentally combining these similar facts, Kinsey invented a new phrase despite believing that he was reporting an old one.[12]

From then on, the story of the name's origin may have been retold until it became largely accepted, with its connection to Kinsey and Malinowski having faded. Writers began using the expression for sexual intercourse in the late 1960s, and as Alex Comfort's bestseller The Joy of Sex (1972) and the Oxford English Dictionary (1976) spread the term 'missionary position', it gradually replaced older names.[14] By the 1990s, it had spread to other languages: 'Missionarsstellung' (German), 'postura del misionero' (Spanish), 'missionarishouding' (Dutch) and 'position du missionaire' (French).[12]