wench

   This old-fashioned word for a girl or woman would probably only be used jokingly in modern times, though from the sixteenth century it was commonly used as an endearment to a man’s wife, daughter, or sweetheart.

   In the Shakespeare plays many young ladies are addressed as ‘wench’, ‘sweet wench’, ‘good wench’, etc. Such usage persisted into the nineteenth century.

   In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss a father calls his daughter ‘my wench’. Mrs Gaskell, in Cranford, has: ‘So, Martha, wench, what’s the use of crying so? In The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton, set in the 1960s, use of the term to his lover by a male character is clearly humorous.

   Since the word was at one time especially associated with country girls, milkmaids, and other country wenches, and with serving wenches, or maid servants, it could never be applied to young ladies of high birth. Until the eighteenth century ‘wench’ was also commonly used of prostitutes. It is probably the serving-maid connotation which has survived most strongly, so that a man using the term in modern times implies that the woman concerned is there to attend to him. Few men now dare to do such a thing seriously, hence the joking usage. ‘You think last night was enough to quench my burning passion?’ says a young American to his bride, in War Brides, by Lois Battle. ‘Come over here, m’wench,’ he adds.