Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A girl is a young female human, usually a child or an adolescent. While the term girl has other meanings, including young woman, [1] daughter [2] or girlfriend [1] regardless of age, the first meaning is the most common one. The treatment and status of girls in any society is usually closely related to the status of women in that culture. In ...
" fæmnan", an Old English word for 'female' The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning "woman", by way of the Old French femelle. [7] It is not etymologically related to the word male, but in the late 14th century the English spelling was altered to parallel that of male.
The word woman can be used generally, to mean any female human, or specifically, to mean an adult female human as contrasted with girl. The word girl originally meant "young person of either sex" in English; [16] it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a female child. [17]
Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex. [28] An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English.
English nouns are not generally considered to belong to gender classes in the way that French, German or Russian nouns are. There is no gender agreement in English between nouns and their modifiers (articles, other determiners, or adjectives, with the occasional exception such as blond/blonde, a spelling convention borrowed from French). Gender ...
The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language of 1882 defined gender as kind, breed, sex, derived from the Latin ablative case of genus, like genere natus, which refers to birth. [25] The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of gender as "kind" had already become obsolete.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
An "it girl" [a] is an attractive young woman who is perceived to have both sex appeal and a personality that is especially engaging. [1] The expression it girl originated in British upper-class society around the turn of the 20th century. [2] It gained further attention in 1927 with the popularity of the Paramount Studios film It, starring ...