Why a wife was grammatically neuter

A closer look

Linguistic rules rarely make any logical real-world sense. In Old English, nouns possessed grammatical gender, but it had absolutely nothing to do with biological reality. The word 'wif' (which became wife) was classified as a neuter noun, while the word 'wifmann' (which became woman) was strictly masculine. So, for centuries, referring to a female human grammatically required masculine pronouns, perfectly highlighting how absurd historical language constructs were.