200px|right|thumb|Birth of Venus 1862 by Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval A woman (irregular plural: women) is a female human.

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 sex or age. This is the old usage of "Man" in English. It derives from Proto-Indo-European *mánu- 'man, human', cognate to Sanskrit manu, Old Church Slavonic mǫžĭ, 'man', 'husband'.

In older English language the words wer and wyf (also wæpman and wifman) were 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 wifman (which eventually evolved into woman) was retained for "female human". ("Wif" also evolved into the word "wife".) "Man" carries this old sense of "Human" however, resulting in an asymmetry criticized as sexist. (See also womyn.)

A very common Indo-European root for woman, *g^wen-, is the source of English queen (Old English cwēn primarily meant woman, highborn or not; this is still the case in Danish, with the modern spelling kvinde), as well as gynaecology (from Greek gynē), banshee fairy woman (from Irish bean woman, sí fairy) and zenana (from Persian zan). The Latin fēmina, whence female, is likely from the root in fellāre (to suck), referring to breastfeeding.

The symbol for the planet Venus is the sign also used in biology for the female sex. It is 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

see: muliebrity

Currently in the English language there is no commonly-used word for a woman who has passed menopause, although historically a woman in the third part of her life was known as a crone, which was originally not a pejorative term. The three ages of woman were historically known asFact: date=March 2009 "maiden, matron, and crone" and are sometimes quoted asWho: date=March 2009 "maiden, mother and crone". This could perhaps be rendered in modern English as "girl", "mature/grown woman" and "older/old woman".

The word woman can be used generally, to mean any female human, or specifically, to mean an adult female human as contrasted with girl. 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 use of the word to refer to a fully grown woman may cause offence. In particular, previously common terms such as office girl are no longer used.