Woman/Queen/Wife/Lady #etymology

The roles afforded to women throughout history, as with the words that refer to them, seem to vacillate between the extremes of queens and ladies on the one end and vilified figures of shame on the other, so it’s only through wiping out these oppressive and misogynistic stereotypes that we can achieve a paradise of equality. Woman was formed in Old English as the compound wifman meaning literally “woman-person” from the word elements wif “woman” (which later became narrowed in sense to “married woman” as Modern English wife) and man (which in OE could mean either “man” or “person”). The parallel compound word for “man” in OE was wæpen-man literally “weapon-person”. The ultimate origin of wif is uncertain but two suggestions are a proposed Proto-Indo-European root *ghwibh- meaning “shame” and also “pudenda”, which would give it just one cognate outside the Germanic languages, kwipe or kip “female pudenda” from the extinct ancient language Tocharian, or otherwise from the PIE root *weip- “to twist, turn wrap” (also the source of the word wipe), from the idea of a “veiled person” as it has often been a cultural norm for women to cover their head for the sake of modesty, as with the medieval European garment called a wimple, also from this same root. The usual word for “woman” in Proto-Indo-European was *gwen-, the source of Greek gyne “woman” (found in the word misogyny) and of OE cwen “woman, wife, queen”, which went from a general word for “woman” or “married woman” to “wife of the king”. The related but now out-of-use term quean spelled with an went the other way coming to mean “whore”. Lady or OE hlæfdige, literally “loaf-maker”, (with the parallel male compound hlaford “loaf-guardian” or ModE lord) is made up of hlaf “bread, loaf” + -dige from PIE *dheigh- “to form, build”, also the source of Latin figura and English figure, and Avestan diz “to make, to form (a wall)”, part of the compound pairidaeza “enclosure, park”, which was borrowed into Greek as paradeisos, eventually becoming English paradise.