The Meaning of Lady

The ending in words like spinster and spinster shows us how the sort of low status, low paid work that single women were often forced to do becomes the name for that category. Lady comes to us from an old English compound meaning loaf need the person who's needing the bread dough before your shiny mixer comes in. It perhaps in its earliest form it reflects some of those segregations of types of work by gender but even by the time it's recorded in the earliest written English it's become an honorific title - you can give a queen this is a lady who has other ladies to do the loaf need it.