WEREWOLF, VIRILE, VIRTUOUS

According to the Indo-European Roots Index (IRI) of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, werewolf, virile, virtuous come from the same Indo-European (IE) root, *WĪ-RO, which means “man”.
The noun werewolf is a compound whose first element, were-, comes from Old English (OE) wer “man”. Thus, werewolf means “man-wolf, a man who is capable to transform himself into a wolf”. The OE word wer stopped being used in the 13th c. according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). OE wer descends from the IE root through the Germanic (Gmc) form *wir-az. The change from IE */i/ to Gmc */e/ is explained by the changed called Velar Umlaut, whereby in North-West Germanic (NWGmc) a closed high vowel in the first syllable of word opens and lowers when the next syllable contains a velar vowel, such as */a/. Thus, Gmc *wir-az > OE wer. However, this change did not take place in Latin (Lat), where the IE vowel */i/ remained unchanged. Werewulf, “werewolf,” occurs only once in Old English, about the year 1000, in the laws of King Canute: “lest the madly ravenous werewolf too savagely tear or devour too much from a godly flock.” Therefore, the Lat cognate is vir “man”.
The adjective virile “manly, masculine, characteristic of man” was first used in English by Caxton in his translation of The Aeneid (1490), according to the OED. The OED also says that it is a borrowing either from Latin virilis or from Old French viril. Whatever the case may be, virile is an adjective made up of the noun vir and the suffix -ilis.
Our third word, virtuous may be said to be composed of virtue and the suffix –ous. However, it is not an English coinage, but a loan-word. The noun virtue was borrowed from Anglo-Norman French (AN) vertu in the middle of the 13th century. AN vertu comes from Lat virtus “manliness”, ultimately from the same IE root *WIR-. The adjective virtuous also comes from AN, from the adjective vertuous, which in turn comes from Lat virtuōsus, which is made up of the noun virtus and the suffix –ōsus. What is interesting the semantics of the word virtuous: originally it meant “manly, masculine”, but today the adjective means “free from vice, righteous, good” and can also describe women. This looks like a contradiction in terms: a virtuous woman. So, two questions need answering. First, when did the original meaning disappear? Second, when did the new meaning appear? Again, our source is the OED. Virtuous definitely stopped meaning “manly” at the beginning of the 17th c., but the new meaning had appeared some centuries before, in the 14th c. Chaucer was the first English writer to apply the adjective to women, in The Man of Law’s Tale: “They can not gesse That sche had doon so gret a wikkednesse, For they han seyen hir so vertuous.” Thus a semantic connection can be established between the three words because they all descend ultimately from the same IE root. As we can see these three words come from the same Indo-European root *w ro, and this root has evolutioned in a different way in different languages, but always with the meaning 'man'.