When English speakers think about “vocabulary,” we tend to think of words that were borrowed into the language from Latin or Greek or French—like the words vocabulary and language. So many new words from these foreign or ancient sources entered English that, by the mid-1500s, there was a backlash against them, and a movement arose to create words with Old English roots to displace Latin borrowings. For example, some writers used words like forespeache to mean “preface” and endsay for “conclusion.” A few of these are still with us; naysay was an artificial concoction invented during this period to provide a Germanic replacement for refusal. The boundaries of English vocabulary were shifting during those years. One thing that had already shifted was grammatical gender. Old English words had genders, which we still see in the other European languages, but English simplified its grammatical categories during the Middle Ages and entered the Early Modern era without inflections (different endings) or genders for nouns.
One consequence of this was the loss of the feminine noun ending -ster. The -er ending for nouns that is still the usual way to apply an activity to a person had been the masculine ending: dancer, runner, painter, and singer all show this pattern. The feminine ending survives in only a very few terms, including brewster and webster, which meant “(female) brewer” and “(female) weaver,” respectively. But these words are rarely encountered today. Some terms with the -ster ending remain as entries in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary with the label archaic, including lewdster (“a lewd person”) and sewster (“seamstress”).
The fact that seamstress is more familiar than sewster is testament to the extent to which French forms displaced English forms following the Norman Conquest. Today we think of -ess— the French feminine ending—as the mark of a feminine noun, like princess, actress, and waitress.
What happened to the -ster ending? It lost its gender specificity. In some cases it might have referred to a female; lobster may have been construed to be a hen of the species and subsequently became the generalized term, but the word dates back to Old English. The ending has been applied to new terms without any gender specificity, probably mostly on phonetic grounds, ever since. Penster (“writer”) and whipster (“whippersnapper” or “one that uses a whip”) both date to the Elizabethan era, while ringster (“a member of a political or price-fixing ring”), rodster (“angler”), and tonguester (“a talkative person”) all were coined in the 1800s. More recent coinages will be more familiar: gangster, jokester, hipster, prankster, puckster, punster, roadster, scenester, speedster, and tipster all entered the language much more recently.
The most prominent survivors in our vocabulary are spinster and, of course, sister.
Follow Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, on Twitter @PeterSokolowski.