The word 'girl' was used for both boys and girls just 700 years ago!
The origins of the word ‘girl’ shows that it had nothing to do with gender and used to denote both young men and women even 700 years ago.
While the word 'girl' is now used strictly to mean a young woman, it had nothing to do with gender before. When we use other words derived from 'girl' such as 'girly' or 'girlish', we usually get a pink vision in our heads which denotes something opposite to what we denote as 'many' or masculine. The word 'girl' is not just a noun anymore but something stereotypically and high-pitchedly weak and delicate. Even though the word 'girl' is being redefined with images of girl-power, the origins of the word 'girl' were gender neutral.
How was the word 'girl' first used?
The greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer, was the first known person to use the word 'girl', except that it was spelt 'gyrl' in Old English language.
Chaucer used 'gyrl' in the General Prologue to his famous 'The Canterbury Tales' in 1387.
Back then, 'gyrl' meant a young person - a boy or a girl; the sex of the person wasn't important.
Chaucer wrote about the Summoner (in Old English):
In daunger hadde he at his owene gyse
The yonge gerles of the diocise,
And knew hir conseil, and was al hir reed.
Here, the Summoner knows the secrets of all the young people and not just the "younge gerles".
How was gender differentiated when using 'girl' back then?
In fact, if the writer needed to differentiate between the sex of the young person back in the 1300s, a qualifier would need to be added - a boy was called a 'knave girl', while a girl was called a 'gay girl'.
A boy could also be called a 'knave child' while a girl could be called a 'maiden child'.
When did the use of the word 'girl' become more gendered?
The meaning of the word 'girl' started to shift towards a more gendered use in the early 1400s.
John Heywood in 1546 wrote in his book of proverbs:
The boy thy husbande, and thou the gyrle his wyfe.
By the next century, the meaning of 'girl' as a 'young woman' became more or less official as noted by the Oxford English Dictionary.
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