1799: Widow(er) Nov 17, 2019

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English, compared to many Indo-European languages, is fairly ungendered, but it does crop up in some places. Still, when it comes to gendered forms of words, it is usually the feminine which is seen—falsely or otherwise—to come from the masculine. This is not the case with 'widow' and 'widower' where the '-er' is clearly a masculine extension of the feminine. In any case, it follows the Germanic pattern of '-er' as a masculine suffix, but in that case, such as with modern German, the feminine ending would be '-erin', unlike here where it is absent.
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