Abstract
No proposed etymology for English ‘girl’ can be more than the merest suggestion, tentatively put forward to provoke further debate. The complete absence of documentation of the word in lexical use before 1300 and as a name before 1200, as well as the lack of cognates in any other language, mean that evidence required to prove or disprove any proposed etymology does not exist. The usage of ‘girl’ in Middle English (ME) suggests that it was at first a word of low speech register, probably arising by metonymy of a word of another meaning, rather than by regular phonetic processes acting on a word with the present meaning. It seems to at first have denoted a young person of either gender; some of the earliest usages are ambiguous on this point.1 The task, thus, cannot be to posit a provably correct theory but rather to propose ideas that are...
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