Other forms: girls
A girl is a female child. A little girl, a girl of nine, girls and boys.
Applied to an adult woman, girl is contested: among friends it is affectionate — a girls' night out — and from a stranger or a manager it can read as belittling, particularly at work. That is worth knowing before using it. The safe word for an adult is woman. Note girlfriend, which is a separate entry, and that girl guide, girl band and girl power are all fixed compounds with their own histories.
1noungirlA female child.~21%
“The girl at the front had her hand up throughout.”
2nounyoungA young woman.~79%
“She was a girl of nineteen when the photograph was taken.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
girl is a young female person.
Middle English gerle meant a child of either sex, and it narrowed to female only in the fifteenth century. The word's origin before that is genuinely unknown, which is remarkable for something so basic — English simply has no record of where it came from.
Middle English
girle
English, today
girl
Built from
From Middle English girle. From Middle English gerle, girle, gyrle (“young person (boy or girl)”), perhaps from Old English gyrele, from Proto-West Germanic gurilā, from a zero-grade diminutive of gaurā + -ilā. Ultimately of unknown origin. a doublet of gal/gyal and gyaru. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA