Planar Adventures for Dummies: So what do you call a female werewolf?

Friday, March 30, 2018

So what do you call a female werewolf?

There are several gendered words for werewolves. Werewolf, he-werewolf, she-werewolf, werewolfess... but one feminine form that has caught on recently is "wifwolf." But why?

According to a few popular but questionable sources, like tumblr and tvtropes, the feminine form of werewolf is *wifwolf. (The asterisk is a linguistic convention used to indicate that a word is not attested in an original corpus.) According to the etymology propagated therein, Old English formed gendered nouns by adding prefixes: the word man meant "human," while *werman and wifman meant "man" and "woman," respectively. Eventually *werman was dropped and man came to mean both "human" and "man," while wifman evolved into the Modern English woman.

This etymology is false, but contains a kernel of truth. In Old English the words for "human," "man" and "woman" were man, wer and wif, respectively. Eventually wer was dropped and man came to mean both "human" and "man," while wif came to mean "wife." Due to this shift, wifman was coined to mean "woman." The Old English wif and wifman evolved into the Modern English wife and woman, respectively.

Curiously, the Old English word wæpnedman (syncopated to wæpnman and then wæpman) was a compound synonymous with wer. It literally meant "armed man," but through a double entendre this referred to the male sex possessing a penis. Although the American Heritage Dictionary claims that wæpman and wifman formed a pair equivalent to wer and wif, none of the other dictionaries I surveyed have suggested this was ever the case.

Modern English, like its antecedents, already has extensive rules for forming new words without invoking false etymology. Although descended from Old English, the word werewolf is equivalent to a compound of wer or were- ("man") and wolf. The masculine form of wolf is formed by adding the prefix he- to write he-wolf. The feminine form of wolf is formed by adding the prefix she- or suffix -ess to write she-wolf or wolfess. The same applies to werewolf to write she-werewolf or werewolfess. Through Google Books I have attested these words in print going back at least a century ago. The exception is he-werewolf, formed by analogy with he-wolf and she-werewolf, which appears only in the last couple of decades.

So a female werewolf is called a she-werewolf or a werewolfess while a male werewolf is called a he-werewolf, obviously. (There does not appear to be a standard masculine suffix in Modern English.)