50 Lines a Woman

woman: n. “an adult female human being”

Woman is a remarkable word insofar as its origin is concerned. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) expends fifty lines detailing the evolution of the word’s spelling and pronunciation from Old English through Middle English, Anglo-Welsh, and Modern English. The modern spelling was first recorded in the late thirteenth century, with the plural form women not appearing until a century later. By the fourteenth century, both woman and women appeared consistently in print.

The original ninth-century Anglo-Saxon form, wifman, was created by combining wif and man. As in German, Old English nouns were fully inflected—meaning, among other things, that nouns have gender (which until recently was generally a grammatical term). Wif was a neuter noun designating a female person. Man was a masculine noun designating a male or female person. Combining the terms provided a feminine noun exclusively designating a female person.

Rejiggering Gender

The OED’s first definition—“an adult female human being”—prevailed for a millennium. It all seems straightforward enough. However, in the 1960s, feminist thinkers began to use the word gender in their examinations of socially constructed attributes of the two sexes. Eventually, subjective psychological and social attributes were exchanged for objective biological determinants. The result appears to have stymied certain government officials who cannot define the thousand-year-old term; in 2022, the most recent appointee to the United States Supreme Court explained in a confirmation hearing that because she was not a biologist, she could not define woman.

Eyes That See

In contrast, Judith Loftus, a character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (see p. 54), has no trouble distinguishing a man from a woman when Huck visits her one evening dressed in a calico gown to gather information without giving away his identity. After a long conversation, Mrs. Loftus reveals that she knows Huck is not a girl.

She points out the way he threads a needle, the way he throws an object at a rat, and the way he catches a lump of lead by clapping his knees together. She can discern from certain behaviors an individual’s sex. In other words, she recognizes a boy when she sees one, despite the way he is dressed or the intonations of his voice. Had Mrs. Loftus been asked to define woman, she would not have had to consult a textbook or Charles Darwin.

Similarly, parents, doctors, nurses, and midwives recognize the clear biological markers of male and female when a baby is born. (They do not assign a sex; they observe it.) A mother who has just given birth to a girl imagines her becoming a mother herself one day. A father imagines her on his arm as he walks her down the aisle to marry a man of whom he approves. When grandparents give the baby a blanket, regardless of color, they know whether they are welcoming a grandson or a granddaughter into the family.

The Cambridge Dictionary still carries the same primary definition that appears in the OED. However, a newly added second definition reflects the subjectivity and confusion now prevalent in academia, government, and the media: “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

A biologist could offer no help in clearing up this confusion. In fact, no one could. Since language exists to facilitate communication among whole populations, a meaning for a word that is knowable only subjectively by the speaker—and alterable at will—does not promote understanding. Rather, it confuses communication while ignoring objective reality. An undeceived, unconfused person knows what a woman is, without the help of either a biologist or a dictionary.