A woman is a female human, in contrast to an adult male, who is a man.
The term woman (irregular plural: women) is usually used for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent. However, the term is also sometimes used for a female human regardless of age, as in phrases like "women's rights".
Etymology
The
English term "man" (from
Proto-Germanic mannaz "man, person") and words derived therefrom can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their gender or age. This is indeed the oldest usage of "man". In
Old English
the words
wer and
wyf (also
wæpman and
wifman) were what was used to refer to "a man" and "a woman" respectively, and "man" was gender neutral. In
Middle English man displaced wer as term for "male human", whilst wyfman (which eventually evolved into woman) was retained for "female human". "Man" does continue to carry its original sense of "
Human" however, resulting in an
asymmetry sometimes criticized as sexist.
* (See also
Womyn.)
The symbol for the planet
Venus is the sign also known in biology for the female sex: a stylized representation of the goddess Venus's hand
mirror: a circle with a small cross underneath (
Unicode: ♀). The Venus symbol also represented
femininity, and in ancient alchemy stood for
copper. Alchemists constructed the symbol from a circle (representing
spirit) above a cross (representing
matter).
Terminology
The
English language's original word for "woman" was
Old English wīf, akin to German
Weib; it later became the modern word "wife." The modern word "woman"
etymologically derives from
wīfmann, with the addition of
mann, "person", from Germanic
mannaz. This formation is peculiar to English. The equivalents for "man" in Old English were
wer (a cognate of Latin
vir, "man") and
wǣpnedmann, literally "weaponed person". As previously mentioned, the term
man continues to carry its original sense of "
Human", though this usage results in an asymmetry which is sometimes criticized as sexist.
The word
girl originally meant "young person of either sex"; it was only around the beginning of the
16th century that it came to mean specifically a
female child. Nowadays
girl is also often used colloquially to refer to a young or unmarried woman. Since the early
1970s, feminists have challenged such usage, and today, using the word in the workplace (as in
office girl) is typically considered
inappropriate in the
United States and
United Kingdom because it implies a view of women as infantile. The use remains commonplace in several other
English-speaking countries.
Conversely, in certain non-Western cultures which link family
honor with female
virginity, the word
girl is still used to refer to a never-married woman; in this sense it is used in a fashion roughly analogous to the obsolete English
maid or
maiden. Referring to an unmarried female as
woman can, in such a culture, imply that she is sexually experienced, which would be an insult to her family.
In more informal settings, the use of
girl to refer to an adult female is also common practice in certain usage (such as
girls' night out), even among elderly women. In this sense,
girl may be considered to be the analogue to the British word
bloke for a man. Some regard non-parallel usages, such as
men and girls, as
sexist. A number of other
derogatory terms for women are also in common usage.
There are various words used to refer to the quality of being a woman. The term "womanhood" merely means the state of being a woman; "femininity" is used to refer to a set of supposedly typical female qualities associated with a certain attitude to
gender roles; "womanliness" is like "femininity", but is usually associated with a different view of gender roles; "femaleness" is a general term, but is often used as shorthand for "human femaleness"; "distaff" is an archaic adjective derived from women's conventional role as a spinner, now used only as a deliberate
archaism; "
muliebrity" is a "neologism" (derived from the Latin) meant to provide a female counterpart of "
virility", but used very loosely, sometimes to mean merely "womanhood", sometimes "femininity", and sometimes even as a collective term for women.
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Meta Description: [ Women's role and prominent women in the Muslim faith. From the time of the Prophet through today. ]
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