3 May 2021
There were three basic Old English words for male and female humans, man, wer, and wif. And from these came two compounds also meaning man and woman, wæpman and wifman. Other Old English words for man and woman existed, many of them found chiefly in poetry, but etymologically it makes sense to group together the discussion of these five words. First, let’s take on man.
In Old English, one finds the forms man and mon. Of the two, mon would appear to be the older form and more common in the Mercian and Northumbrian dialects, with man arising in the West Saxon dialect. But since the majority of surviving texts are West Saxon, the man form is more common in the corpus. And since West Saxon was the dialect spoken in the region encompassing London and recorded in later court documents as the kings of Wessex came to rule all of England, man would become the standard form in Middle English and later. Although one can still see mon in Middle English texts from the Midlands.
In Old English, the word man could refer to both any person regardless sex or gender or to a male human. And, while the generic use of man is rightly discouraged in Present-Day English for being sexist, it can still be commonly seen, as in the word mankind. We can see this move toward non-sexist language in the phrase from the original 1966 Star Trek series, where no man has gone before, which was changed in the 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation series to where no one has gone before.
(Indo-European languages consider sex and gender to be binary: male and female. While they may have terms that are sex- and gender-neutral that can refer to both male and female humans, they do not typically have terms for sexes and genders other than the binary male and female. Note: I’m not talking about grammatical gender here; that is a very different thing. Many Indo-European languages also have a neuter grammatical gender.)
As examples of these two uses of man, here are two passages from the same writer, Ælfric of Eynsham, a monk and homilist writing c.1000 C.E., and who was, perhaps, the chief prose stylist of the Old English period. The first, which uses man to refer to a generic human, is from Ælfric’s homily for the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter. In this passage, Peter is defending his association with and conversion of gentiles.
Gif god him forgeaf þæs halgan gastes gife, swa swa us on frymþe on fyrenum gereordum, hwæt eom ic manna þæt ic mihte god forbeodan?
(If God gave them the gift of the Holy Ghost, just as to us at the beginning in fiery tongues, what manner of man am I that I might forbid God?)
That manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius E.vii is from the early eleventh century. One later manuscript, the twelfth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343 uses the spelling monna. This manuscript is from the West Midlands or possibly the Hereford region and is an example of a later survival of that form in a Midlands dialect.
But in another homily about the cross-dressing Saint Eugenia, Ælfric uses man to refer specifically to a male human. Eugenia successfully took on the guise of a man in order to become a monk and eventually an abbot before being martyred. In this passage from early in her life, the bishop Helenus sees through her disguise, but he baptizes her and tells her to continue on her path. Again, this is from the early eleventh-century manuscript:
He genam hi þa onsundron and sæde hyre gewislice hwæt heo man ne wæs and hwylcere mægþe and þæt heo þurh mægð[-] had mycclum gelicode þam heofonlican cynige þe heo gecoren hæfde and cwæð þæt heo sceolde swiðlice æhtnyssa for mægðhade ðrowian and þeah beon gescyld þurh þone soðan drihten þe gescylt his gecorenan.
(Then he took her aside and said to her with certainty how she was no man and of which people [she was] and she through the virginity that she had chosen had greatly pleased the heavenly king and said that she would greatly suffer persecutions for her virginity and yet be shielded through the true Lord who shields his chosen ones.)
These two senses of man come down to us today pretty much unchanged.
The words wer and wif, specifically denoting male and female humans, can be seen in the poem Beowulf. Here the hall Heorot is being prepared for the celebrations following Beowulf’s killing of Grendel:
Ða wæs haten hreþe Heort innanweard
folmum gefrætwod; fela þæra wæs,
wera ond wifa þe þæt winreced,
gestsele gyredon.
(Then, by command, the interior of Heorot was quickly decorated by hand; there were many men and women who prepared the guest-hall.)
Wer survives today only in fossilized form, such as in the word werewolf (literally, man-wolf). But in addition to denoting a female human, wif could also denote the spouse of a man, a wife. That sense is the chief sense of the word in Present-Day English.
And there are two compounds based on man, wæpman and wifman. The first has disappeared from the language, but wifman survives today as woman.
Wæpman literally meant man with a weapon. It might refer to a warrior, but weapon here is more likely a reference to a penis. Just as weapon can be used in present-day slang to mean penis, so it could a thousand years ago. We have this from a mid tenth-century Latin-English glossary:
Genitalia, þa cennendlican.
Uirilia, þa werlican.
Ueretrum, teors.
Calamus, teors, þæt wæpen, uel lim.
Testiculi, beallucas.
(Genitalia, the genitals.
Uirilia, the masculine.
Ueretrum, tarse [i.e., penis].
Calamus, tarse, that weapon or limb.
Testiculi, bollocks.)
And we also see wæpman being specifically to refer to a man in relation to penetrative sex. A tenth-century Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels has this for Luke 2.23:
sicut scribtum est in lege Domini, Quia omne masculinum adaperiens vulvam sanctem Domino vocabitur
sua auritten is in æ Drihtnes þæte eghuelc he oððe weepenmon to untynes hrif oððe wom oððe inna halig Drihten bið geceiged
(As it is written in the law of the Lord, that every he or wæpman who opens a vulva or womb or uterus will be called holy by the Lord.)
And we see wæpman and wifman side by side in a late tenth-century translation of the Deuteronomy 22.5, in a passage that neither the aforementioned Eugenia nor Helenus appears to have read:
Ne scryde nan wif hig mid wæpmannes reafe, ne wæpman mid wifmannes reafe.
(No woman should clothe herself with a wæpman’s garments, nor a wæpman with a woman’s garments.)
Wifman started losing the < f > toward the end of the Old English period. From another biblical translation, this one of Judges 4:22 found in a late eleventh-century manuscript. Here Jahel, the woman in question, has just killed Sisara by hammering a nail through his temple:
Barac com sona, sohte þone Sisara; wolde hine ofslean. Ða clipode seo wimman cuðlice him to; het hine sceawian þone þe he sohte; & he geseah þa hwar Sisara læg, & se teldsticca sticode þurh his heafod.
(Barac came at once, seeking after Sisara; he wished to kill him. Then the woman called clearly to him that she would show him whom he sought; and he saw where Sisara lay, and the tent-peg stuck through his head.)
The vowel shift and spelling to woman happened in Middle English.
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