Plural of “woman”

The plural of woman is women.

Why

"Woman" comes from Old English "wifman" (literally "wife-person" or "female person"), and its plural "women" reflects the same i-mutation vowel shift that produced "man/men" — but with an added twist: the spelling kept the "wo-" of the singular in both forms, while the pronunciation of the first vowel actually changed between singular ("WUH-man") and plural ("WIH-min"), making "woman/women" one of the rare English word pairs where the spelling barely signals how differently the two forms are actually pronounced.

That mismatch between spelling and pronunciation is unusual enough that it's a common stumbling point for English learners and even some native speakers reading the word aloud for the first time in a formal context, since nothing about the letters "wom-" versus "wom-" (identical in both words) hints at the vowel change that happens between the singular and plural pronunciation. The compound "woman" itself replaced an even older Old English word, "wif," as the primary term for an adult female person, with "wif" narrowing over time into the specifically marital sense preserved today in "wife" — meaning "woman" and "wife" share a genuinely tangled etymological history despite functioning as entirely separate words with entirely separate irregular plurals in modern English. This kind of semantic splitting, where one older word narrows into a specialized sense while a new compound takes over the general meaning, is a common pattern across the history of English core vocabulary.

Usage note

"Women" takes a plural verb without exception ("the women are here"), and unlike "man," which has largely resisted regularized compounds gaining traction, "-woman" compounds like "chairwoman/chairwomen" and "spokeswoman/spokeswomen" follow the identical irregular pattern of the base word, never regularizing to "-womans."

"Womankind," like "mankind," is a grammatically singular collective noun and never takes a plural form, and many contemporary style guides now favor simply "women" as a plural noun over older collective terms in most contexts, treating the countable plural as clearer and less dated than the abstract collective. Occupational "-woman" compounds have followed a somewhat different trajectory than "-man" compounds in recent decades: rather than being widely phased out in favor of gender-neutral alternatives, many have simply become genuinely optional alongside neutral terms ("chairwoman" alongside "chairperson" or "chair"), reflecting a less uniform shift than the broader move away from generic masculine "-man" terms.

Common real mistakes

The main real slip is pronunciation rather than spelling — reading the plural "women" with the same first-syllable vowel as the singular "woman," which is an easy mistake precisely because the spelling gives so little indication of the actual sound change involved. Writers sometimes also mistakenly pluralize "woman" as "womans" when it appears as part of a longer compound noun phrase, forgetting the irregular plural still applies even when "woman" functions as a modifier within a larger phrase.

The wider pattern

"Woman/women" shares its historical vowel-shift mechanism with "man/men," "foot/feet," "tooth/teeth," and "goose/geese," though it's unique among that group for how sharply its spelling and pronunciation have diverged between the singular and plural forms over the centuries.

Examples

• Three women were waiting outside the courthouse.
• The women on the panel each gave a different perspective.
• Local women organized the entire fundraiser themselves.
• Two women in the front row asked pointed questions.
• The novel follows several women across three generations.
• Women in the industry have pushed for more representation.
• A handful of women started the company from a garage.
• The women's team won the regional championship.
• Older women in the community mentor the younger volunteers.
• The exhibit honored women scientists overlooked by history.
• The panel included five women from different scientific disciplines.
• Several women in the audience raised their hands with follow-up questions.
• The nonprofit trains women entrepreneurs in basic financial literacy.