Women

Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all the odder is that some feminists had in the past 30 or 40 years adopted the spelling wimmin because it did not include the element –men. Its pronunciation didn’t include the element ‘men’, but now it is being made to.

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In origin, woman does not come from womb-man, but from wife-man. In that compound, man meant a human of either sex, and wife meant ‘woman’ (in the sense of Latin mulier), not ‘mate’ (Latin uxor). The uxor sense for wife came in later, though the former meaning persisted: a fishwife is not married to a fish.

The word in Old English was grammatically masculine. The reason that woman and women are pronounced so strangely is fantastically complicated. I do not intend to go into it. But as one would expect, the vowel in the second element differed according to whether the word was in the nominative, accusative, genitive or dative, in the singular or plural. The vowel in the first syllable changed over time.

The spelling of the first syllable became conventionally fixed by the end of the Middle Ages, reflecting the pronunciation in the singular, but not reflecting it in the plural. We are used to such anomalies. The spelling of the second syllable came simply to parallel the spelling of man and men, without representing the actual pronunciation.

A backwater in the history of women was the use of the spelling wimmin, mostly in the 19th century, before the blossoming of feminism, to indicate dialect speech. ‘Ef your boots are new,’ says a character in Bret Harte, the gold-rush writer, ‘and you are n’t pestered with wimmin and children.’ But the Queen herself would have pronounced it wimmin. It was like Dickens indicating non-standard speech by using the spellings wos and sed, which also embody the standard pronunciations of those words. Perhaps someone will now start a new pronunciation for them too.