Captainess

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A woman who commands a ship, aircraft, or sports team
2. A female leader in charge of a vessel, aircraft crew, or competitive squad
3. A woman holding the rank or position of captain over a crew or team

Etymology: "Captainess" is a plain formation: the noun "captain" with the feminine suffix "-ess," which English took from French and which has been attached to many nouns to mark a female holder of a role. Its earliest recorded form, in Middle English, was "captensse," a spelling that shows the older pronunciation of the first syllable had shifted by the time the word was written down in its modern shape. The word sits in an unusual pairing. It is a piecewise doublet of "chieftainess," meaning that the two words developed along separate paths but share the same underlying idea of a female leader, one drawn from the Latin "capitaneus" and the other from the native "chieftain" tradition. Both words were formed in parallel to describe a woman in command, so the pair is less a matter of one descending from the other than of two English speakers reaching for the same feminine title from different starting points.