Laugh if you like, but I have watched Wednesday—the Tim Burton series about the Addams daughter. We, however, are here for the etymology.
Every episode title contains the word woe: “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe,” “Woe Is the Loneliest Number,” “Woe What a Night,” and so on. A rare word, an archaic one. I knew it, but had never wondered where it came from.
Wednesday’s child
The joke is older than the series, and it explains the heroine’s name.
There is a fortune-telling rhyme, first recorded in the 1830s, that assigns a character to each day of the week: Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace… and, third in the queue, Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Charles Addams named his gloomy little girl after that line, and the scriptwriters have been quietly mining it for episode titles ever since.
There is a second layer, too. Wednesday is Old English Wōdnesdæg—Woden’s day, the day of Odin. So a character in a Netflix comedy carries a Norse god in her name and a nursery rhyme in her adjectives.
The cry itself
Woe goes back to Old English wā, an exclamation of grief, and behind that to a Proto-Indo-European *wáy.
In German it became Weh, “pain, suffering,” and travelled onwards into Yiddish as וויי vey—the vey of oy vey, “oh, woe,” of vey iz mir, “woe is me,” and of okh un vey.
The same cry lies in Ancient Greek οὐαί and Latin vae—as in Vae victis!, “Woe to the vanquished!”, the words Brennus the Gaul is supposed to have thrown onto the scales along with his sword when the Romans complained that his weights were rigged.
In the Slavonic languages: Russian uvy, Bulgarian uvi, Serbo-Croat avaj. Among Iranians, وای /vāy/, whence Armenian վայ vay and Georgian ვაი(მე) vai(me). The Turks, being neighbours, say the same: vay be!, vay vay vay!
The part that does not fit
And then there are the Semites: Aramaic וי /way/, and the Arabic root و-ي-ل (w-y-l), “woe.”
Which ought to stop us, because Semitic and Indo-European are not relatives. There is no common ancestor here, no inherited word, nothing to descend from. So either this is one of the great coincidences, or the whole premise needs adjusting.
It needs adjusting. Woe is what linguists call a primary interjection—not a word a language passes down, but a noise a body makes, which each language then spells and tidies up in its own way. It is not inherited. It is re-invented, over and over, because the equipment producing it is the same everywhere.
The proof lies outside both families altogether. Mandarin says 哎呀 āiyā. Korean says 아이고 aigo. Japanese says ああ aa. Not a scrap of relationship between them and us—and the same open vowel, the same falling glide, the same shape in the mouth.
There is a reason. Pain does not consult the dictionary. It drops the jaw, opens the throat and pushes air, and what comes out is an open vowel with a glide on the end. Every language on earth has caught that noise and written it down; the differences are matters of orthography.
Which is rather the point
So the title of this piece is more modest than the truth. This is not a common Indo-European grief. It is a common human one.
We do not wail alike because we descend from the same ancestors. We wail alike because we have the same mouths and the same troubles.
Woe unites us. One would prefer that it were not the only thing that did.
