Mom

How to spell mom

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mom

What does mom mean?

1. nounAn informal and affectionate word for one's mother.

Mom in a sentence

• My mom drove me to the airport at dawn.

• Every Sunday he calls his mom to catch up.

Where does mom come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is one of those words that babies seem to invent for themselves: it grows out of 'mamma', a reduplicated nursery word built from the soft, easy 'ma' sound that infants produce before almost any other. Forms of 'mamma' and 'mama' appear across an astonishing range of unrelated languages, which is why linguists treat them as natural infant babble rather than a single inherited root. In English, 'mamma' was clipped down to short, affectionate pet forms, giving both 'mom' and the British 'mum' during the modern period. The spelling with 'o' became the standard informal word for mother in American and Canadian usage, and it also survives strongly in parts of the English Midlands. Because the vowel is short and the word is so familiar, the spelling rarely causes any trouble; the only real choice a writer faces is 'mom' versus 'mum', which is a matter of dialect rather than error.

How the word is built

• mom (informal shortening of 'mamma', itself a reduplicated baby-talk syllable 'ma'
• 'ma')