the.com/girl
Female human before the world decides she needs an adjective in front of it.
means A young female human — a girl, from childhood through the teen years, before anyone's cleared her to drop the word and just be a 'woman.'
from Oddly murky for such a basic word. Middle English 'gyrle' or 'girle' originally meant a child of EITHER sex — a kid, full stop. Nobody's certain where it came from before that; it might be related to German dialect words for small children or young people, but that's a guess dressed up as a cousin. Somewhere in the 1300s–1400s the word narrowed to mean specifically a female child, abandoning the boys to other words entirely. So the gender-specificity you take for granted is actually the late addition — the word started out genderless and got narrowed, not the other way around.
- etymology
- once meant any young child, regardless of sex
- usage flex
- can soften or diminish depending entirely on tone
- linguistic quirk
- grown women still get called this at 40
- power move
- reclaimed as slang for solidarity, not size