an adult female human being: a woman, and, when the sentence ties her to a man, his wife.
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for a grown female. Whether it means simply "a woman" or specifically "a wife" is not a difference in the word but a difference in the sentence around it. Biblical Hebrew has no separate word for wife at all: a wife is the woman of a particular man, marked by a possessive ending ("his woman") or by a following name ("the woman of Uriah"). So when Deuteronomy 24:1 says that a man "takes a woman," English Bibles rightly print "takes a wife," but the marriage is supplied by the situation, not by the vocabulary.
The most quoted sentence about this word is a pun, not a family tree. In Genesis 2:23 the man says she shall be called "ishshah" because she was taken out of "ish," the word for man (אִישׁ). The two do sound alike, and the storyteller plays on that. But they come from different roots. The plural of the word for woman keeps a hidden "n" that the singular swallowed, and its relatives in the neighbouring languages keep the same consonant, while the word for man has no such history behind it. The pairing of the two words is real and deliberate; the derivation is not.
Two narrower uses are easy to miss. Of animals the word names the female of a mating pair, the one that goes with the male. And in a fixed phrase, most often "a woman to her sister," it stops naming a female at all and simply means "one to the next." Hebrew uses it that way of curtains sewn together, of the touching wings of the creatures in Ezekiel's vision, and of people going out each in her own direction.
One word has to carry the whole cast: Eve, the matriarchs, the midwives of Egypt, the wise woman of Tekoa who argues a king into changing his mind, the medium at Endor, the widow of Zarephath, the foreign wives of Ezra's crisis, and the "woman of valour" who closes Proverbs. Nothing in the word itself ranks or narrows them. The range belongs to the stories, not to the vocabulary.