What does “Virgin” mean?

[Tenzin]

Disclaimer this is about semantics in English.
Maybe I think too much about words. After all English is not the only vernacular language in the Catholic Church. I always had this on my mind.

Why are chaste men referred to as “young men” and chaste women as “virgins”?
I remember hearing this in the English Liturgy of the Syro-Malabar Rite.

Saints who are women are called virgins. According to Oxford, this definition is archaic.
Can male saints be labeled virgins or not?
Is there an ecclesiastical assumption that men not being chaste is tolerated?
I am a bit confused by the use of “Virgin” by the Catholic Church.
What does this mean and why the preference to use “Virgin” for female chaste saints and not male chaste saints?

 

[BartholomewB]

Historically, the word has always applied to girls and women, and only secondarily, by analogy, to males. In Latin, virgo is a feminine noun and, as far as I know, was always used exclusively of the female sex, though it was sometimes used in the more general sense of any young unmarried woman, whether or not she was a virgin.

 

[Fauken]

Saints who are women are called virgins.

Not always. Women who were married can be called Holy Women. If their husbands died before they did, they’re Widows. That’s how I think it is in my 1962 breviary anyway.