Terminology
The first element of woodwose is usually explained as from wudu "wood", "forest". The second element is less clear. It has been identified as a hypothetical noun wāsa "being", from the verb wesan, wosan "to be", "to be alive". The Old English form is unattested, but it would have been wudu-wāsa or wude-wāsa.
Terminology in the Middle Ages was more varied. In Middle English, there was the term woodwose (also spelled wodewose, woodehouse, wudwas etc.). Wodwos occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1390). The Middle English word is first attested in the 1340s, in references to the "wild man" decorative artwork popular at the time, in a Latin description of an embroidery of the Great Wardrobe of Edward III, but as a surname it is found as early as 1251, of one Robert de Wudewuse. In reference to an actual legendary or mythological creature, the term is found in the 1380s, in Wycliffe's Bible, translating שעיר (LXX δαιμόνια, Latin pilosi) in Isaiah 13:21 The occurrences in Gawain and the Green Knight dates to shortly after Wycliffe's Bible, to ca. 1390.
Old High German had schrat, scrato or scrazo, which appear in glosses of Latin works as translations for fauni, silvestres, or pilosi, identifying the creatures as hairy woodland beings. Some of the local names suggest connections with figures from ancient mythology. Common in Lombardy and the Italian-speaking parts of the Alps is the term salvan or salvang, which derives from the Latin Silvanus, the name of the Roman tutelary god of gardens and the countryside. Similarly, folklore in Tyrol and German-speaking Switzerland into the 20th century included a wild woman known as Fange or Fanke, which derives from the Latin fauna, the feminine form of faun. Medieval German sources give as names for the wild woman lamia and holzmoia (or some variation); the former clearly refers to the Greek wilderness demon Lamia while the latter derives ultimately from Maia, a Greco-Roman earth and fertility goddess who is elsewhere identified with Fauna and who exerted a wide influence on medieval wild-man lore. Slavic has leshy "forest man".
Various languages and traditions include names suggesting affinities with Orcus, a Roman and Italic god of death. For many years people in Tyrol called the wild man Orke, Lorke, or Noerglein, while in parts of Italy he was the orco or huorco. The French ogre has the same derivation, as do modern literary orcs. Importantly, Orcus is associated with Maia in a dance celebrated late enough to be condemned in a 9th- or 10th-century Spanish penitential.
The term was usually replaced in literature of the Early Modern English period by classically-derived equivalents, or "wild man", but it survives in the form of the surname Wodehouse or Woodhouse (for instance in the name of the author P. G. Wodehouse, or Jane Austen's character Emma Woodhouse). "Wild man" and its cognates is the common term for the creature in most modern languages; it appears in German as wilder Mann, in French as homme sauvage and in Italian as uomo selvatico "forest man".
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