Widwe

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. An archaic spelling of widow, meaning a woman whose husband has died and who has not remarried
2. An older form of the word for a woman who has lost her husband through death and remains unmarried
3. A historical variant spelling referring to a woman whose spouse has died and who has not taken another husband

Etymology: Old English "widewe" (also "widuwe") meant "widow" in the most literal sense, a woman whose husband has died, and it is a survivor of the very old Indo-European word for a woman left without a husband. Its roots connect it to a family of words in other languages: Latin "vidua," Greek "ēitheos" and Sanskrit "vidhavā" all share the same ancestry, and "vidua" is in fact a near-twin of the English term. The meaning "bereaved unmarried woman" in the entry above is a detail that matters to the word's history: "widwe" in Middle English applied to any woman who had lost her husband, and the "unmarried" sense is a later, narrower gloss rather than an original feature. The word was spelled with many variants before the modern "widow" settled in during the late Middle English period.

Synonyms: relict, dowager

Antonyms: widower