My ever-so-darling, hip, and very cool daughter has just informed me of the origin of the word ‘Woman’.
Two blokey Neanderthals who were strolling along a path came across a Very Well Endowed female-type.
“Whoa-Man, did you see those?”
I think it’s time I talked to some adults.
Why Neanderthals? Why not Cro-Magnons?
The truth is sometimes more bizarre than fiction.
Chamber English Dictionary; the etymology of “woman” is Old English wimman, from wifman (long “i”), from wif, a woman and man, a man or a human being.
So “woman” is a version of “wife-man”.
The lecture This explains why we pronounce “women” with an “i”, and it also explains the phrase “man and wife”; the word “wife” was used to mean “woman”, and still is in some places:o
My dictionary of etymology theorises that the “i” sound difference between “woman” and “women” may have come from the influence of word pairs like “foot” and “feet”, G. Odoreida.
Aside from that – this all looks like it’s about to become all GQish.
Man did not originally mean a male human being, but just a human being. 
I don’t have a cite at hand, but if I remember my Old English grad seminar correctly, **man ** was generic, with **werman ** for *man * and **wifman ** for woman.
The wer- in werman is also the wer- in werewolf. You know, a wolf-man.
So then would a wolf-woman be a wifwolf?
German Weib (meaning ‘woman’) is a cognate of English wife. So where did the word wife originate?
The question had baffled Indo-European etymologists for years. Since all the known cognates were found only in Germanic, it looked like one of those words that either got into Germanic from some unknown, unrecorded outside source, or was coined by proto-Germanic speakers after they had split from the rest of Indo-European, or else it died out in all other branches except Germanic.
But now the Proto-Indo-European root of wife has been found. The other language group that has cognates is Tocharian.
The 4th edition of the American Heritage Dictionary has this newly found etymology. Wife is traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ghwibh- ‘shame, pudenda’. The notes on Indo-European roots there say:
“Expressive root, found only in Tocharian (in the literal meaning) and Germanic. WIFE, HUSSY, from Old English wif, woman, from Germanic *wibam, woman (with semantic weakening from the original meaning; for the semantics, compare the histories of pudendum and cunt)… compare Tocharian B kwipe and Tocharian A kip, female pudenda.”
No, a werwif. Which just sounds like I have a speech impediment.
Bwahahahaahaha… hehehehe…
*wipes tear from eye…
Why isn’t anyone laughing? Am I the only one who got it?
I find it interesting that the word in English that has the deepest roots for the meaning “woman” is actually queen. It goes back to the same Indo-European root as the Greek word gune, as in gynecology.
A variant is quean, an archaic word for “woman” which probably gave rise to “queen” meaning gay man.
It’s interesting (perhaps only to me) that unlike other European languages, the word “woman” is etymologically related to “man” (compare homme/femme, aner-gune, vir-mulier, Mann-Weib, and so forth) but the word “queen” isn’t closely related to “king” (unlike König-Königin, rex-regina and cognates).
Etymology can be pretty embarassing sometimes. Another example is bad, long a mystery word, but now though to be derived from baeddel, meaning an intersexed or homosexual person.
No, a werwif would be someone who was both man and woman. But you could have a werwifwolf–i.e., a hermaphrodite who changed into a wolf during the full moon.
…yeah, I’ve managed to confuse myself. I used to know this stuff. I swear.
I always thought, in English, the similarity between woman and *womb-man * bore some exploration.
<Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer
Woman!
Woe, man!
Whoa, man!
</Mike Myers>
I know, when I was a kid I thought of womb-man as an explanation for woman, but etymologically it turns out to be vulva-human.
When I was a kid, I also assumed the name of Arizona was derived from “arid zone” – isn’t it obvious? – but the accidental resemblance is not the source of the actual etymology. There are lots of coincidences like that in linguistics.