Girle

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An older spelling of girl, referring to a young female child or a young person of either sex
2. A historical variant of the word for a young woman or female child, used in earlier English writing
3. An obsolete form of girl meaning a child or youth, especially a young female, as used in early English

Etymology: "Girle" is simply an obsolete spelling of "girl", and the older form it preserves shows how the word once applied to children of either sex. In Middle English, "gerle", "girle" and "gyrle" could mean any young person, boy or girl, and the word's ancestor may have been an Old English form, "gyrele", built from a Proto-West Germanic base meaning "young child" with a diminutive ending attached. That base is itself a zero-grade form of an older root, and its ultimate origin remains unknown. The word is a doublet of "gal" and "gyal", which came into English by a different route and kept the same ancestry, so the two forms are siblings rather than one simply descended from the other. Its relatives elsewhere in Germanic lean toward a childish or scolding sense: German "Gör" and "Göre" mean a brat or cheeky young child, and Low German "Gör" means simply a child.