Other forms: women
A woman is an adult female person. A young woman, three women, a woman in her sixties.
The plural is women, pronounced WIM-in, which is the only place in English where an o is said as a short i. Woman is the standard neutral word for an adult, and it is the safe choice where girl, lady or female might carry unwanted implications — female as a noun for a person reads as clinical or hostile. Note woman as a modifier, as in woman doctor, which is now avoided; and womanhood, womankind and businesswoman.
1nounwomanAn adult female person.~98%
“The woman who runs the shop has been there since 1988.”
2nounwomenWomen in general.~2%
“The right of a woman to vote was won county by county.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
woman is an adult person.
Old English wifmann is wif, a woman, plus mann, a person — mann meaning any human, not a male one. The word for a male was wer, which died out; so English lost its word for a man and gave the generic word that job instead.
Middle English
womman
English, today
woman
From Middle English womman. From Middle English womman, from earlier wimman, wifman, from Old English wīfmann (“woman”) literally “female person”, a compound of wīf + mann. For details on the pronunciation and spelling history, see the usage notes below. Cognate with Scots woman, weman (“woman”), stq Wieuwmoanske (“female person, female human, woman”). Similar construction can be found in West Frisian frommes (“woman, girl”) (from frou and minske, literally "woman human") and Afrikaans vroumens (“woman”) literally “woman-person”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA