Mermaiden

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A legendary female sea creature with the upper body of a young woman and the tail of a fish, said to live beneath the waves
2. An imaginary young woman of the ocean who has a fish's tail in place of legs, often featured in folklore and sailors' tales
3. A fabled maiden of the sea, part human and part fish, who appears in myths and stories about the deep water

Etymology: "Mermaiden" is a compound built from two plain English words, and its parts sit in the same place the more familiar "mermaid" does. The first element, "mere," is an old word for the sea or a large body of water, and the second is "maiden," a young woman. Put together, the name describes exactly what the creature was imagined to be: a maiden of the sea. The compound is older than its everyday rival. Its Middle English form, "meremaiden," was built from those two elements, and Old English already had a close relative, "meremennen," used for a mermaid or a siren. The shape of the word thus reflects the older English habit of naming a sea creature by joining "mere" to a word for a woman, rather than borrowing a foreign term. Over time, "mermaid" won out over "mermaiden" in common use, and the longer form came to feel poetic and archaic. The compound survives mostly in older literature and in deliberate revivals, where it keeps the original picture of the sea-maiden visible in the name.