We all know that boys and girls are different, but it’s not true that ALL girls like pink and all boys like football. None of us think like that any more, right…?!

Well, when it comes to the stories behind the words ‘girl’ and ‘boy’, expectations of the way they behaved and lived were very fixed.

800 years ago, the world for both sexes was very different than it is today...

In the 1300s, the word ‘girl’ meant simply a ‘child’, male or female, and it stayed that way for many centuries until people began to apply the word only to female children. One suggestion is that ‘girl’ is linked to another English word ‘garrulous’, an adjective that today still means ‘talkative’. In other words, girls were seen as chatterboxes!

What about boys then? Their lives, back in medieval days, could be very miserable. Those from poor families were often held captive and worked as slaves for the wealthy. It’s possible that ‘boy’ comes from an Old French word that meant ‘to tie someone up by the feet with straps’, perhaps because boy servants were cruelly tied up when they weren’t working. Eventually the term lost that meaning when boys — thankfully — had a much freer life, and so ‘boy’ simply described a male child, as it does today.

How things have changed — boys aren’t usually slaves any more, and girls definitely aren’t the only ones who talk a lot these days!