Godwyf

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic Old English term for a goddess, a female divine being worshipped in early English belief
2. A word from Old English meaning a female god, used in the period before the English language took its modern form
3. Old English vocabulary referring to a woman regarded as divine, a goddess of the pre-Christian and early medieval world

Etymology: Old English "godwyf" meant "goddess" and is built from "god" plus "wyf", the Old English word for "woman" (the source of modern "wife", which originally meant woman in general). The compound is a straightforward formation, so the most interesting thing here is the wider meaning of the second element: "wyf" once applied to any adult woman, and only later narrowed to a married woman. The word is attested in Old English texts, and it survived into Middle English and beyond only as a rare, poetic or archaic term. Its form shows that the Anglo-Saxons treated the feminine counterpart of a god as a simple compound, pairing a masculine and a feminine term in the same way they formed other gendered words.

Synonyms: goddess