Why is the plural of woman Wimen and not Women

1. Origin story: "woman" started as wīfmann — literally 'female person'

Old English distinguished wer = adult male, wif = adult female, and mann = person; the term for an adult female person was a compound wīfmann (wife-person), which gives us modern "woman" in singular form ^{[2] [4]}. Several sources summarise that "woman" did not derive from "womb" nor simply from "man" meaning male; it arose from a compound that identified gender plus personhood ^{[5] [6]}.

2. Why the plural doesn't look like 'wimen': inherited vowel change, not a typo

The plural historically was wīfmen (the plural of wīfmann), which preserved a different vowel in the second syllable; over centuries English sound changes produced the pronunciation distinction we now have between "woman" (/ˈwʊmən/) and "women" (/ˈwɪmɪn/). Etymologists note that the plural retained the older vowel sound and that spellings such as "wimmin" were attested as phonetic variants by the 20th century, reflecting pronunciation rather than a logical orthographic rule ^{[3] [2]}.

3. Spelling stabilized late — Middle English experiments became Modern English norms

Spelling and pronunciation were fluid across Middle English: forms like wifmon, wifmanna, wifmone, wimman and wommon appear in the record before the language settled on "woman" for the singular and "women" for the plural by the 1600s ^[2]. That patchwork of spellings explains why Modern English orthography sometimes preserves historical pronunciations that no longer match visual expectations ^[2].

4. The pronunciation change is not unique, but it’s unusual enough to attract attention

Linguists and language discussions note that "woman/women" involve a vowel alternation inside a multisyllabic word that is atypical compared with regular -s plurals; forums such as English Language & Usage explore whether comparable English pairs exist and treat the pattern as noteworthy rather than impossible ^[7]. Etymology sources characterise "women" as the plural that retained an older vowel, which explains why spelling and pronunciation diverge ^[3].

5. Folk etymology and social readings: why people invent other stories

Popular misconceptions — for example, that "woman" means "womb-man" or that the word embeds "man" to imply women are derivative — are debunked by etymologists who trace the compound to wīf + mann rather than a literal "man" suffix carrying male primacy ^{[6] [5]}. Alternative spellings like "womyn" or "womxn" are social and political interventions intended to challenge perceived male-centered language; their histories and motivations are discussed in activist and college press pieces and on language forums ^{[8] [9]}.

6. What the sources agree on and what they don’t say

Sources consistently agree that the word derives from Old English wīfmann and that the plural evolved from wīfmen, producing the modern divergence between "woman" and "women" ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Available sources do not mention any single clerical decision or specific printing-standard moment that fixed the spelling/pronunciation pair; instead they attribute the outcome to gradual sound change and orthographic standardisation (not found in current reporting).

7. Why this matters beyond trivia

The story illustrates how English preserves ancient sound-patterns in its spelling and highlights why appeals to surface morphology (seeing "man" at the end of "woman") can mislead. Debates over alternative spellings — womyn, womxn — reveal social motives to reclaim or reframe language; those debates rest on cultural argumentation as much as on etymology ^{[9] [8]}.

Limitations: this summary synthesises the provided etymology and popular-language pieces; deeper scholarly papers on Old English phonology or a specific chronology of orthographic standardisation are not in the current source set (available sources do not mention full phonological reconstructions or specific printers' records).