Woman

A woman is an adult female human. Prior to adulthood, one is referred to as a girl (a female child or adolescent).

Etymology

The spelling of “woman” in English has progressed over the past millennium from wīfmann to wīmmann to wumman, and finally, the modern spelling woman. In Old English, wīfmann meant ‘woman’ (literally ‘woman-person’), whereas wermann meant ‘man’. Mann had a gender-neutral meaning of ‘human’, corresponding to Modern English ‘person’ or ‘someone’; however, subsequent to the Norman Conquest, man began to be used more in reference to ‘male human’, and by the late 13th century it had begun to eclipse usage of the older term wer. The medial labial consonants f and m in wīfmann coalesced into the modern form “woman”, while the initial element wīf, which had also meant ‘woman’, underwent semantic narrowing to the sense of a married woman (‘wife’).