Babe

How to spell babe

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce babe

What does babe mean?

1. nounAn affectionate name for a romantic partner or loved one.
2. nounA baby or very young child, used in older or literary contexts.

Babe in a sentence

• He signed the card to his wife with the single word babe.

• The carol describes a babe lying in a manger.

• She called her boyfriend babe when she thanked him for the flowers.

• The old poem speaks of a sleeping babe in its mother's arms.

Where does babe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Babe comes from Middle English baban or babe, a word built from the simple repeated sounds (ba-ba) that infants make before they can speak, so it is essentially imitative or echoic in origin rather than borrowed from another language. The same babbling root lies behind the closely related word 'baby', which is really 'babe' plus the affectionate diminutive ending '-y'. In its earliest English use, from around the 1300s, it meant a literal infant or very young child, a sense that survives today mainly in older or literary phrasing. Over the centuries it softened into a tender form of address between adults, and by the twentieth century it had also acquired the informal sense of an attractive person. The silent final '-e', which is the only real spelling point, simply follows the regular English pattern of marking the long 'a' vowel.

How the word is built

• babe (Middle English bab-, imitative of infant babble)
• silent -e