Wife

How to spell wife

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wife

What does wife mean?

1. nounA woman to whom a person is married.

Wife in a sentence

• He travelled to the coast with his wife for their anniversary.

• The bank account is shared between him and his wife.

Where does wife come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English wif, which simply meant 'woman' and only later narrowed to 'a married woman'. This native Germanic root is shared with the Dutch wijf and the German Weib, all going back to a common ancestor whose precise original meaning is uncertain. The broad sense of 'woman' survives in the compound 'midwife', literally 'with-woman', the helper present at a birth, and in the old word 'fishwife' for a woman who sold fish. The same wif also lies behind 'woman' itself, which began as wifman, a 'woman-person'. The spelling has stayed remarkably close to its thousand-year-old form, with the long vowel and the f that switches to a v in the plural 'wives'.

How the word is built

• wif (Old English: woman, married woman)
• -e