bachelor

A bachelor is a man who is not and never has been married.

==Etymology== A bachelor is first attested as the 12th-century bacheler: a knight bachelor, a knight too young or poor to gather vassals under his own banner. The Old French ' presumably derives from Provençal ' and Italian ', but the ultimate source of the word is uncertain. The proposed Medieval Latin * ("vassal", "field hand") is only attested late enough that it may have derived from the vernacular languages, rather than from the southern French and northern Spanish Latin . Alternatively, it has been derived from Latin ' ("a stick"), in reference to the wooden sticks used by knights in training.