Babysitter

How to spell babysitter

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce babysitter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does babysitter mean?

1. nounA person hired to look after a child or children while the parents or guardians are away.

Babysitter in a sentence

• They hired a trusted babysitter for the evening so they could attend the dinner.

• The babysitter arrived at seven and put the children to bed by nine.

Where does babysitter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent modern compound built from two everyday English words: 'baby', an affectionate nursery word for a very young child recorded from the late Middle Ages, and 'sit', the ancient Germanic verb meaning 'to be seated', here used in its extended sense of staying with and watching over someone. The phrase 'to sit with' a child had long meant to keep watch over it, and from that the American noun 'baby sitter' emerged in the 1930s for a person hired to mind children while the parents were out. The single-word form 'babysitter' followed as the compound settled in, and the verb 'to babysit' was later coined backwards from it, a process called back-formation. The spelling trap is purely mechanical: writers wonder whether to split it ('baby sitter'), hyphenate it ('baby-sitter'), or join it, and the modern standard is the solid one word. The doubled 't' is also easy to drop, since it comes from adding '-er' to 'sit', which keeps its short vowel by doubling the final consonant.

How the word is built

• baby (infant)
• sit (to tend or watch over)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)