So you are saying, Kathy, that the word 'widow' can refer to both men and women. All right. The word 'widower', however, can refer only to men. However, when I googled 'widow' (which can refer to both men and women) I almost exclusively got pictures of women. But when I googled 'widower', which can only refer to men, I got more pictures of women than of men. Go figure.

Kathy, you also said:

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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.
There are two possible interpretations of this. Either the word 'widow' refers almost equally to men and women, and the reason why 'widow' gets many more hits than 'widower' is simply because widowed men are usually described as widows. But another explanation is also possible. While I am in no way denying that 'widow' can refer to a man, it could still be that most of the hits you get when you google 'widow' may refer to female widows. To women. And if that is the case, then the reason why 'widow' gets so many more hits than 'widower' could be mostly because widowed women are considered more interesting than widowed men. It could be that our society (or at least Google) assumes that a woman is harder hit by losing her husband than a man is hit by losing his wife. And because of that, there will be more articles and references to bereaved women than to bereaved men. Again, this supports my hypothesis that it might be particularly interesting to write about widowed Clark, because he can be assumed to take the loss of his wife much more seriously than "the average guy" would do.

Ann