Other forms: widows
A widow is a woman whose husband has died. A young widow, left a widow, the widow of the pilot.
The male equivalent is widower, and widowed is the adjective and the term used on official forms. Being widowed is a legal status affecting pensions, tax and inheritance, which is why the word appears so often in paperwork. Note black widow, a spider named for the female eating the male; widow's peak, a V-shaped hairline; and, in printing, a widow, meaning a single line of a paragraph stranded at the top of a page.
1nounwidowA woman whose husband has died.
“She was a widow for longer than she had been married.”
widow is a marital status.
Old English widuwe descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to separate — the same root as divide and, at a distance, individual. The word is shared across the whole family: Latin vidua, Sanskrit vidhava, Russian vdova.
Proto-Indo-European
*dwóh₁
Middle English
widwe
English, today
widow
Built from
From Middle English widwe. From Middle English widwe, from Old English widuwe (“widow”), from Proto-West Germanic widuwā (“widow”), from Proto-Germanic widuwǭ (“widow”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁widʰéwh₂ (“widow”), possibly from h₁weydʰh₁-, weydʰ- (“to separate, split, cleave, divide”), whence also wood from Old English widu, wudu. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA