Symbol of the planet Venus, also used to indicate the female gender among animals who reproduce sexually

A Bangladeshi woman weaving. Textile work has historically been considered a female occupation in some cultures.

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Women

A woman is a female human. The term woman (irregular plural: women) usually is used for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent. more...

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However, the term woman is also sometimes used to identify a female human, regardless of age, as in phrases such as "women's rights".

Etymology

The English term "Man" (from Proto-Germanic mannaz "man, person") and words derived therefrom can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their gender or age. This is indeed the oldest usage of "Man" in English. This derives from a Proto-Indo-European root *man-" meaning hand. A similar cognate is Old Norse "mund", hand. The distinctive and dexterous hands of humans, compared to those of other animals, are the basis of this term and the similarly derived term, "manual", by hand.

In Old English the words wer and wyf (also wæpman and wifman) were what was used to refer to "a man" and "a woman" respectively, and "Man" was gender neutral. In Middle English man displaced wer as term for "male human", whilst wyfman (which eventually evolved into woman) was retained for "female human". "Man" does continue to carry its original sense of "Human" however, resulting in an asymmetry sometimes criticized as sexist by those who fail to understand its root in describing the hand as characteristic of humans. (See also Womyn.)

The symbol for the planet Venus is the sign also used in biology for the female gender once a male gender exists in the animal species being described (males do not exist in early animal forms, where all reproduction is female generation of more females, exclusively): a stylized representation of the goddess Venus's hand mirror or an abstract symbol for the goddess: a circle with a small equilateral cross underneath (Unicode: ♀). The Venus symbol also represented femininity, and in ancient alchemy stood for copper. Alchemists constructed the symbol from a circle (representing spirit) above an equilateral cross (representing matter).

Terminology

The English language's original word for "woman" was Old English wīf, akin to German Weib; it later became the modern word "wife." The modern word "woman" etymologically derives from wīfmann, with the addition of mann, "person", from Germanic mannaz. This formation is peculiar to English. The equivalents for "Man" in Old English were wer (a cognate of Latin vir, "man") and wǣpnedmann, literally "weaponed person". As previously mentioned, the term Man continues to carry its original sense of "Human", though this usage results in an asymmetry which is sometimes criticized as sexist when the root is unknown.

The word girl originally meant "young person of either sex" in English; it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a female child. Nowadays girl sometimes is used colloquially to refer to a young or unmarried woman. During the early 1970s feminists challenged such use, and today, using the word, girl, to refer to grown women in most social settings and the workplace (as in office girl) typically is considered inappropriate and denigrating in the United States and United Kingdom because it implies a view of women as infantile, having a parallel in the use of the term "boy" for black men to deny their adult status in racist communities. It is sometimes stated that the use remains commonplace in several other English-speaking countries, without such implications, but research regarding that is lacking.