Other forms: wives
A wife is the woman a person is married to. My wife, his ex-wife, the farmer's wife.
The plural is wives. It is one half of the pair with husband, and both are used regardless of the sexes involved in a marriage. The word appears in a few old compounds where it simply means woman: midwife, fishwife, housewife, old wives' tale. Note wifely, which is dated; trophy wife, which is an insult to both parties; and that the possessive is wife's, singular, and wives', plural.
1nounwifeThe woman somebody is married to.
“His wife had been a teacher for thirty years.”
wife is a marriage partner.
Old English wif meant simply a woman, and it is the wif inside wifmann, which became woman. So wife is the older word and woman is built out of it, which reverses what most people would guess.
Middle English
wyf
English, today
wife
Built from
From Middle English wyf. Middle English wyf, wif, from Old English wīf (“woman, wife”), from Proto-West Germanic wīb, from Proto-Germanic wībą (“woman; wife”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA