Alternative spellings of woman
feminist alternate spellings of "women"
Womxn and womyn are alternative political spellings of the English word woman, used by some feminists. There are other spellings, including womban (a reference to the womb or uterus) or womon (singular), and wombyn or wimmin (plural). Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man" or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm.
These re-spellings existed alongside the use of herstory, a feminist re-examination and re-telling of history.
Definitions
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines womyn as "in feminist use: women."
The OED added womxn in 2021, and defines it as "adopted by some as a more inclusive alternative to womyn, which is perceived as marginalizing certain groups, especially ethnic minority and transgender women". Dictionary.com added womxn to its dictionary in 2019 with the definition "used, especially in intersectional feminism, as an alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequences m-a-n and m-e-n, and to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary people."
See also:
The dictionary definition of womyn at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of womxn at Wiktionary
Old English
The word woman is derived from the Old English word wīfmann ('woman-person'), which is formed from wīf (the source of wife), then meaning 'woman', and mann (the source of man), then meaning 'person, human', originally without connotations of gender. Man took on its additional masculine meaning in the Late Middle English period, replacing the now-obsolete word wer. This has created the present situation with man bearing a dual meaning—either masculine or nonspecific.
Old English had a system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine or neuter, similar to modern German. In Old English sources, the word man was grammatically masculine but gender-neutral in meaning.
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