Wommen

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic plural form referring to adult human females ; can also signify a general group of female individuals ; occasionally used in historical texts as a variant spelling for multiple women
2. Old-fashioned term indicating more than one adult female person ; used historically to reference groups of females ; serves as an obsolete plural spelling of "woman"
3. A historical or nonstandard way to denote several female adults ; represents female persons in plural ; found in older literature as a plural for "woman"

Etymology: "Wommen" is a spelling variant of "women," the plural of "woman," and it appears mostly in older and nonstandard writing. The plural "women" was formed from the Old English "wifmann," a compound of "wif" (wife, or woman) and "mann" (person). The first element was once a general word for a female person, and "wifmann" later shortened to "woman" while the plural "wimmen" and "wymmen" stayed in use for centuries. Because the plural was spelled in many different ways before English spelling settled, "wommen" is one of many historical forms that people wrote as the sound of the word appeared to them. Since "wommen" is only a plural form, its story is that of "woman" and its spelling history. The vowel in "women" was once pronounced differently, and the "o" spellings reflect how writers recorded it in the centuries when English spelling had no fixed standard.

Synonyms: women

Antonyms: men