Google immediately responded to my request for widowers by asking me if I didn't prefer pictures of widows instead. To Google, it was apparently more natural to ask for pictures of women grieving for their husbands rather than for husbands grieving for their wives!
Or it could simply be that, in North America at least, I believe that the use of the word "widow" is more common than using the word "widower".
For example, you'll see a newspaper article with a sentence like
Cassandra, Jackson's widow, talked about.... But the phrase
Jackson, Cassandra's widower, talked about... would be less common. Often it would be phrased
Jackson, whose wife Cassandra passed away in 2000, talked about... or
Jackson, whose late wife Cassandra founded.... I personally have seen sentence constructions similar to my suggestions more frequently than the use of the word "widower". Obviously I have no statistics to back that up, though.
And this is hardly a statistic that I can hang my hat on with any authority, but...
I googled the word "widower", without any descriptor, and was told that there were about 1.3 million instances in the database. I googled the word "widow", and was told of about 16 million. Certainly as far as Google is concerned, the word "widow" is much more common.
Kathy
