Other forms: wenches
A wench is a young woman, in old or joking use. A serving wench, saucy wench, tavern wench.
Nobody uses it seriously now: it survives in historical fiction, in pantomime and in deliberate mock-medieval joking, and outside those it sounds either archaic or rude. In Middle English it simply meant a girl, and it slid downhill through servant to something worse, which is a very common fate for words meaning young woman. Note that the northern English use for a girl or wife lasted well into living memory.
1nounwenchA young woman, in old or joking use.
“In the old ballad, a sailor falls in love with a pretty serving wench.”
wench is a young woman.
Middle English wenche is a shortening of wenchel, a child of either sex, from an Old English word meaning something unsteady or tottering. The narrowing to girl and then the slide in status happened inside about three hundred years.
Middle English
wench
English, today
wench
Built from
The noun is derived from Middle English wench, wenche (“female baby; girl (especially unmarried); maiden, young woman; bondwoman; serving maid; beloved, sweetheart; concubine, mistress; harlot, prostitute”)weinche, wenge, weynche, a shortened form of Middle English wenchel (“girl; maiden; child”), from Old English wenċel, winċel (“child; servant; slave”), from Proto-Germanic wankilą, from Proto-Germanic wankijaną (“to sway; waver”). The English word is cognate with Old High German wenken (“to waver; to give way, yield”), wankōn (“to totter”). The verb is derived from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA