Boys have not always been called boys.
Until the late 15th century the word ‘girl’ simply means a child of either sex.
Boys, where they had to be differentiated, were referred to as ‘knave girls’ .
Girls in the female sense were called ‘gay girls’.
Equally a boy could be a ‘knave child’ and a girl a ‘maiden child’.
The term ‘boy’ was reserved for servants or ‘churls’, the meaning ‘young man’ probably deriving from the latter as a pejorative term but not occurring before 1440.
Also a baby in pink today and it will be almost universally identified as a girl. Yet this is actually the opposite of the system that prevailed until quite recently. Until well into the 20th century, toddlers who were not dressed in a non-gender-specific white, were put in pink for boys and blue for girls.
The Sunday Sentinel noted in March 1914: “Use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”
Four years later, in June 1918, the US magazine Ladies’ Home Journal registered that there was some confusion but added:
“… the generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”