How marriage words evolved over centuries
Recent announcements on Equally Wed, a platform for planning LGBTQ+ weddings, reveal couples choosing nontraditional words to describe themselves and their celebrations. Broom is a combination of bride and groom, and is used by nonbinary people who feel they don鈥檛 fit neatly into either category; so is gride. A gender-neutral word for people committing themselves to one another is marrier. These aren鈥檛 the first changes in the words for a wedding鈥檚 most crucial participants. Even man and wife, husband, and groom were once innovations.聽
In school, I was taught that man and mankind were 鈥渦niversal鈥� words that included women, though this seemed specious even to 8-year-old me, and such usage is now discouraged. In Old English, though, it was true, for the most part. In a 10th-century homily, Christ is described as 鈥渢he son of one man,鈥� that 鈥渕an鈥� being the Virgin Mary; in a retelling of Genesis, God created 鈥渢he two men, Adam and Eve.鈥� 鈥淢an鈥� must mean 鈥渉uman being鈥� or 鈥減erson,鈥� or these lines make no sense.
When Old English writers wanted to specify someone鈥檚 sex, they often used wer for males and wif for females. Another homily relates that in the beginning God created 鈥渢wegen [two] men, wer & wif鈥� 鈥� two humans, man and woman, male and female. In Old English, wif sometimes meant 鈥渨ife鈥� as well as 鈥渇emale person,鈥� and wer could mean 鈥渉usband鈥� as well as 鈥渕ale person.鈥� But while wife endures as the word we know today, wer disappeared around 1200, now found only in the compound name of a mythical monster, the werewolf. At the same time man narrowed its meaning from 鈥渉uman鈥� to 鈥渕ale human鈥� in particular.聽
Husband gained popularity in the 13th century. It derives from the Old Norse husbondi, literally 鈥渉ouse-dweller,鈥� and at first meant 鈥渕aster of the house,鈥� akin to the Latin paterfamilias. Since in this era the head of a household was by definition the male spouse, husband easily applied to the latter role too.聽
Grooms did not appear until much later, however. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, English inherited bride 鈥� a woman who is getting married or is recently married 鈥� from Germanic, making it an extremely old word. Her male counterpart was the brydguma, literally the 鈥渂rideman鈥� 鈥� guma or gome was a poetic word that, like wer, specified male sex. Brydgome became bridegroom after gome became obsolete in the early 16th century, perhaps because groom was already in common use and resembled it. Groom too referred to a person of male sex, but was less august than gome 鈥� a groom was a boy-child or a servant. By the 17th century, groom had decoupled from bride and could stand alone as the male spouse-to-be. 聽
