Old English gender classified words, not people
In Old English, nouns belonged to grammatical classes—masculine, feminine, or neuter. These labels affected how other words in a sentence were formed, much as grammatical gender still does in languages such as French or German. The categories were properties of words, not reliable statements about a person’s sex or identity.
That distinction explains the apparent mismatch between wif and wifmann. Wif, the ancestor of wife, was grammatically neuter. Wifmann, the ancestor of woman, was grammatically masculine. The second word was a compound: wif plus mann, a word for a person or human being. Its grammatical class followed the compound’s structure, not a rule that women were considered men.
What a pronoun could—and could not—tell you
Because grammatical gender shaped agreement, a pronoun referring to a noun could sometimes match that noun’s class rather than the person’s sex. In a sentence, the pronoun might therefore sound unexpected to a modern English speaker. That was a feature of the language’s grammar, not a comment about the individual being discussed.
Over time, English lost most of the endings and agreement patterns that made grammatical gender visible. Modern English pronouns generally track a person’s sex or established pronoun use instead. The old forms preserve a glimpse of a different system: a word meaning “woman” could be grammatically masculine because of how it was built, while a word meaning “wife” could be neuter.
