Girl

How to spell girl

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce girl

What does girl mean?

1. nounA female child or young woman.

Girl in a sentence

• The young girl rode her bicycle to school every morning.

• Each girl in the class received a copy of the workbook.

Where does girl come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The origin of girl is genuinely murky, which is why scholars still debate it. It first appears in Middle English around the 1300s as gyrle or girle, and at that point it simply meant a child of either sex, not specifically a female one. The narrowing to mean a young female happened later, by the 1400s and 1500s. Where the root itself came from is uncertain: one leading idea connects it to an unrecorded Old English form related to a Germanic root meaning 'child' or 'young person', and it has been compared with dialectal and Low German words for a young person. Because no clean ancestor survives in the written record, dictionaries label its deeper history as unknown. The spelling settled on the simple four letters we use today, with the small adult trap being the unstressed -ir- vowel that sounds nothing like its letters.

How the word is built

• girl (a single Old English-era root meaning a young person, later narrowed to a female child); no prefix or suffix