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Woman is actually a shortened version of an older word. Wikpedia tells us the origin: In Old English the words wer and wyf (also wæpman and wifman) were what was used to refer to "a man" and "a woman" respectively, and "Man" was gender neutral. In Middle English man displaced wer as term for "male human", whilst wifman (which eventually evolved into woman) was retained for "female human". ("Wif" also evolved into the word "wife".) "Man" does continue to carry its original sense of "Human" however, resulting in an asymmetry sometimes criticized as sexist. ==== Now, human comes from quite a different stem, from the Latin "humanus" (from homo= human being) via Old French . Now the *man part is something they both have in common, and does stem ultimately from an even older language, the mother language of most European and North Indian subcontinent/ Persian languages, which is called by scholars Indo-European. The word in IE could have, originally meant "thinker", although many scholars see it as originally meaning something to do with the ground ie "earthling".
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