Baby

How to spell baby

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baby

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baby mean?

1. nounA very young child or infant, especially one not yet able to walk or talk.

Baby in a sentence

• The baby slept through the entire flight to Madrid.

• They painted the nursery before the baby arrived.

Where does baby come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Baby grew up in Middle English around the late 1300s as a tender diminutive of 'babe', which itself appears to imitate the repetitive 'ba-ba' sounds an infant makes when babbling. The -y ending here is the same affectionate, smallness-marking suffix found in 'doggy' and 'mummy', so the word literally means 'little babe'. Because its root is imitative rather than borrowed from Latin or Greek, baby has no exotic spelling traps and has stayed remarkably stable in form for centuries. Over time it broadened from naming a human infant to covering the youngest member of any group, a cherished personal project, and, more recently, an informal term of endearment between adults. The plural 'babies' simply follows the regular rule of changing -y to -ies after a consonant.

How the word is built

• bab (imitative of infant babbling)
• -y (diminutive/familiar suffix)