wīfman

Old English wīfman (also wifinann) combined wīf (a woman, a wife) and man (a person). A wīfman was a female person — the female counterpart to the generic man. But the etymology embedded the definition: a woman was defined as a wife-person, a female human whose category included her potential domestic role. The word replaced older terms (cwene, wīf) for female person as the language settled into its Middle English form.

The pronunciation changed dramatically: wīfman became wimman, then wumman, then woman. The spelling woman preserved a ghost of the original wīf, while the pronunciation moved away from it entirely. The Middle English plural wimmen became women — the only English word where the singular and plural are spelled with different vowels (o in woman, e in women).

Wīf itself narrowed in parallel: Old English wīf meant any woman; by Middle English it meant specifically a married woman, giving modern wife. The generic female was taken over by woman while wife became the marital term. Both words were doing the same work from different angles — woman absorbed wīf's generic meaning while wife retained its marital specificity.

Woman has been the site of more linguistic and political argument than almost any other English word. The suffix -woman in compound words (chairwoman, policewoman, councilwoman) asserts female presence in roles previously assumed to be male. Womankind, womanhood, womanly — the compounds have been contested and reclaimed for centuries. The wīf-person is still defining herself.