Word of the Day: May 10, 2009 ~ mother

mother (muhth-er) - noun

A mother is "a female parent."

First used in the written form before the year 900. 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 the English madrigal, material, maternal, matrimony, matrix, matron, and matter) and Greek meter (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.

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