Mamma

How to spell mamma

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mamma

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mamma mean?

1. nounAn affectionate or childish term for one's mother.

Mamma in a sentence

• The toddler ran to mamma as soon as the door opened.

• Every Sunday the whole family gathered at mamma for lunch.

Where does mamma come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is one of the oldest and most universal words in human speech, built from the syllable 'ma' that infants produce naturally during early babbling, then doubled for emphasis. The Latin word mamma meant both 'breast' and, affectionately, 'mother', and the same reduplicated sound appears independently across countless unrelated languages, which is why scholars treat it as imitative of baby talk rather than inherited from a single ancestor. English absorbed the familiar 'mamma' as a tender term for mother by the 1500s, while the learned anatomical sense, the milk-producing gland, came straight from the Latin mamma during the rise of modern medical writing. The same root gives us 'mammal', the class of animals defined by feeding their young with milk, and 'mammary'. The double m in the spelling preserves the Latin form and distinguishes it from the slimmer informal 'mama'.

How the word is built

• mam-
• -ma (a reduplicated infant syllable 'ma' doubled; the spelling keeps the double m)