femeie

• fămeaiă, fămeie — archaic
• fomeie, fimeie — Moldavia (region)

Inherited from Latin familia (“family”). The old sense of "family" in Romanian is now mostly lost, replaced by the neologism familie. Compare Aromanian fumealji, which retained the sense of "family". Despite the phonetic and semantic similarities, is unrelated to Latin femella, and it is improbable that this word influenced the development of the meaning in modern Romanian because the older forms of femeie did not have the sense of woman and the other Romanian/Eastern Romance languages don't have this sense either. It is also unrelated to Latin femina, which produced some apparent "cognates" in the Western Romance languages that only share superficial similarities. For a similar semantic development, see Albanian fëmijë.

• IPA^(key): [fe.ˈme.je]

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eje
• Hyphenation: fe‧me‧ie

• Audio:

  (file)

femeie f (plural femei)

1. woman
2. married woman, wife
3. (obsolete) family
   • 1693, Floarea Darurilor:

     Lot, ieși cu muiarea ta și cu fămeaia ta afară din cetate.

     Lot, exit with your wife and your family outside the city.

• muiere, doamnă

• femeiesc
• familie

• bărbat

• “femeie”, in DEX online—Dicționare ale limbii române (Dictionaries of the Romanian language) (in Romanian), 2004–2025