whuh? "virgo" is latin; the word was in use thousands of years before the start of the christian calendar. mary would certainly not have been called "virgo" during her own lifetime or for several centuries afterwards.
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Mmm ... not exactly. Virgo is indeed a Latin word, therefore it could not have been in use thousands of years before the start of the Christian calendar: the Latin language was less than 500 years in A.D. 1. Now about wheter or not Mary was called 'Virgin' for several centuries afterward ... what do you consider "several"? St. Jerome translated the Gospels into Latin c. 380, and he indeed used the word 'virgin' to describe Mary. Now here's the problem: did the original Greek word 'parthenos' mean 'virgin'? In classical Greek, it definitely did not mean 'virgin'. The New Testament, however, wasn't written in classical Greek. Shades of meaning in Hellenistic Greek are less well-known than in Classical Greek. If it did mean 'virgin', Why did St. Jerome use the word virgo instead of virgo intacta? They did not mean the same thing in the days of the Roman Empire: a woman could be considered a virgo without being what we call 'virgin'. It simply meant that a woman was unmarried, but of marrying age: it had nothing to do with her sexual experience or lack of it. That persisted in the English language even as late as the fifteenth century: virgin = unmarried. But even without figuring out exactly what the words meant, it cannot be disputed that Mary was called Virgin from the very early days of Christianity, though certainly not during her lifetime. What's stickier is whether or not she was the 'Ever-Virgin' of later Christian tradition.
