Happy Mother's Day All You Mothers

mother

Word History

Date of Origin Old English [OE]

The ancestral Indo-European word for ‘mother’ was *māter-, which has descendants in virtually all the modern European languages. It was probably based on the syllable ma, suggested by the burbling of a suckling baby, which also lies behind English mama, mamma (and indeed mammal). Amongst its immediate descendants were Latin māter (source of English madrigal, material, maternal, matrimony, matrix, matron, and matter) and Greek mḗtēr (from which English gets metropolis). In prehistoric Germanic it evolved to *mōthar-, which has differentiated to German mutter, Dutch moeder, Swedish and Danish moder, and English mother.