Just wondering about the connection between "wife" and "weave".

The two words are not often thought to be related etymologically.

Spinster is one of the few agentive nouns in English where the archaic suffix -ster stills refers to a female agent. There are a bunch of proper names that use this suffix: Webster (weaver), Brewster (brewer), Dempster (judge), Baxter (baker), etc. After the suffix was reanalyze to be for masculine agents, the -ess was added to some words like seamstress.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.