“Girl” Used to Mean Either Gender

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Andrew from Madison, Wisconsin.

Welcome, Andrew. What can we do for you?

There was another interviewer on another radio show interviewing Paul Anthony Jones, who had written a book called The Accidental Dictionary, where he was studying how the definitions of words have changed.

And one of the specific things that he brought up, but he didn’t elaborate on that I was curious about, was he talked about how only about 200 or 300 years ago did we start using the term boy and girl to reference children.

Before that time, boy wasn’t really used in that connotation. It was used as sort of like servant or to refer to like a knave or like a wild person or something.

And then girl was sort of a unisex term, which could mean like a dress or like swaddling clothes.

So what my question was is that if this is true, then movies and books and stuff that referred to children as boy and girl before that time are historically inaccurate.

So I’d like to know how were children referred to in the Middle Ages and before that?

You’ve got a great memory for this stuff. You’ve pretty much laid it out.

And so just to summarize, boy didn’t really mean young male child until around the early 1400s. Before that, it meant a variety of other things having to do with servants or people who helped around or slaves.

And girl for a long time, and even occasionally now in Ireland, referred to a young person of either gender. But a girl was also used for other things, slaves and that sort of thing.

And that happened around similar dates, around the 1300s to 1400s. It switched over to be a young female person.

What’s really interesting about this is that this is normal language change, but it always amazes people. And I’ve seen some people make the misassumption that meant that children weren’t seen as unique or standing alone from their adults before that. But that’s not true.

We did call them things. If you look in the Oxford Historical Thesaurus, which is a wonderful, it exactly solves the problem that you’re asking me.

You can look up all the words over time for a young male child and all the words over time for a young female child. You will see that there were words such as knight, exactly K-N-I-G-H-T, or knave, as you mentioned, page, bird even.

Sometimes they were called man, although it was understood with context what they were referring to. Knave bern, which means boy child. Little man, man child, and then by the early 1400s, boy came along.

Girl with similar mate. You’ve heard a lot of these. If you’ve read any fantasy fiction, maiden or wench or lass, all of these terms were widely used.

And then your other question was, are these books and movies and so forth anachronistic if they are set in a time before boy and girl were used to refer to, you know, boys and girls?

And I would say that they’re not anachronistic because you write these bits of entertainment in our current vernacular. We don’t write them in the language of the period. We throw a little bit of color in there.

But frankly, nobody would watch a show that was done completely in Middle English, right?

Yeah, that is a good point. You find knave and wench widely used in the reenactment communities. You say people could do Renaissance fairs and that sort of thing.

Yeah, and knave goes way, way back to Old English. In Old English, they would call boys knaffa.

Knaffa, yeah, and that’s the old pronunciation of the word, right?

Yeah, and it’s related to the German word now for boy, Canaba. But it does blow people’s minds when they hear that the word girl also referred to boys for a long time and occasionally still does in Ireland under certain contexts.

Thank you so much for giving me some more insight into these questions.

Yeah, sure. And like I said, the best work when you want to do these historical diggings, and this is something I recommend to novelists, is the Oxford Historical Thesaurus.

Many libraries have access to it through the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s quite amazing to see these words slowly morph.

The pronunciations change over time. The spellings change. New words come in. Old words push out. Words become more specialized or they become broader.

It’s really wonderful.

Thank you. I collect reference books, so I will look for it.

Yeah, add that one to your collection. Thanks for calling, Andrew.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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