Mother

How to spell mother

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mother

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mother mean?

1. nounA woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth or whom she is raising.
2. verbTo look after someone with excessive or protective care, as a parent might.

Mother in a sentence

• noun

  Her mother drove across the country to help with the new baby.

• verb

  She tends to mother her younger colleagues at the office.

• noun

  Every mother in the support group shared advice about sleepless nights.

• verb

  He did not want anyone to mother him during his recovery.

Where does mother come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Mother is one of the oldest words in the language, descending from Old English modor and tracing back through the ancient Proto-Germanic moder to a shared Proto-Indo-European root mater, which simply meant the female parent. Because this root is so deeply rooted in human family life, close relatives survive across an enormous range of languages: Latin mater, Greek meter, Sanskrit matar, and German Mutter all share the same ancestry, which is why English words like maternal and matrix come from the same family. The 'th' spelling is the trap here, since the original Old English form used a 'd' (modor) that softened into the 'th' sound over the medieval period, the spelling following the changing pronunciation. The final '-er' is not a separate suffix added later but part of the inherited stem, mirroring the parallel pairing in father and brother. By the time of Middle English the word had settled into forms close to the modern spelling, and it has carried the same core meaning for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• moth- (from Old English modor, mother)
• -er (agent/relational suffix, original part of the root)