Tag: Woman

A woman (/ˈwʊmən/), pl: women (/ˈwɪmɨn/) is a female human. The term woman is usually reserved for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent. However, the term woman is also sometimes used to identify a female human, regardless of age, as in phrases such as “Women’s rights”. Unlike men, women are typically capable of giving birth.
The Old English wifman meant “female human” (werman meant “male human”. Man or mann had a gender-neutral meaning of “human”, corresponding to Modern English “one” or “someone”. However in around AD 1000 “man” started to be used more to refer to “male human”, and in the late 1200s began to inevitably displace and eradicate the original word “werman”). The medial labial consonants coalesced to create the modern form “woman”; the initial element, which meant “female,” underwent semantic narrowing to the sense of a married woman (“wife”).
A very common Indo-European root for woman, *gen-, is the source of English queen …