Wife. It is a very profound testimony, yielded by language, to the fact that women are intended to be wives, and only find the true completion of their being when they are so, that in so many languages there is a word which, meaning first a woman, means afterwards a wife, as γυνή, ‘mulier,’ ‘femme,’ ‘weib,’ and our English ‘wife.’ With us indeed the secondary use of the word has now overborne and swallowed up the first, which only survives in a few such combinations as ‘midwife,’ ‘fishwife,’ ‘huswife,’ and the like; but it was not always so; nor in our provincial dialects is it so now. An intelligent correspondent who has sent me a ‘Glossary of Words used in Central Yorkshire’ writes as follows: ‘In rural districts a grown woman is a young wife, though she be unmarried.’
And with that word upstart this olde wife.
Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale.
Like as a wife with childe, when hir travaile commeth upon her, is ashamed, crieth, and suffreth the payne, even so are we, O Lorde, in thy sight.—Isai. xxvi. 17. Coverdale.
Wight. The best discussion on this interesting word is in Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, pp. 439-442, who has a chapter [ch. xvii.], ‘On Wights and Elves.’ ‘Wight’ has for us lost altogether its original sense of a preternatural or supernatural being, and is used, but always slightingly, of men. It is easy to see how, with the gradual contempt for the old mythology, the dying-out of the superstitions connected with it, words such as ‘elf’ and ‘wight’ should have lost their weight and honour as well.
I crouche thee from elves and from wights.
Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale.
The poet Homer speaketh of no garlands and chaplets but due to the celestial and heavenly wights.—Holland, Pliny, vol. i. p. 456.
A black horse cometh, and his rider hath a balance, and a voice telleth among the four wights that corn shall be dear [Rev. vi. 6].—Broughton, Of Consent upon Apocalypse.
When the four wights are said to have given glory, honour, and thanks to Him that sate upon the throne [Rev. v. 14], what was their ditty but this?—Mede, Sermons.