Mummy

How to spell mummy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mummy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mummy mean?

1. nounAn affectionate, childish word for one's mother, used mainly in British English.
2. nounA dead body preserved by embalming and wrapping, especially one from ancient Egypt.

Mummy in a sentence

• The little girl ran to her mummy at the school gate.

• The museum unwrapped one bandage layer of the mummy for the documentary.

• Every birthday card he sends his mummy is signed with a small heart.

• Archaeologists found a remarkably intact mummy in the sealed tomb.

Where does mummy come from?

Language of origin: Other

This single spelling actually covers two words with completely separate origins. The familiar 'mother' sense is a nursery word: it grew from 'mum', a soft, easily babbled syllable that turns up across many languages because the lips close naturally to make an 'm' sound, and English added the cosy diminutive ending '-my' (as in 'tummy') to give 'mummy'. The other 'mummy', meaning an embalmed body, travelled a much longer road from the Arabic word 'mumiya', which referred to bitumen or embalming pitch and derived in turn from the Persian 'mum', meaning 'wax'. Medieval Europeans first used the word for a tar-like medicinal substance scraped from preserved Egyptian corpses, and by the 1600s the meaning had shifted to the wrapped bodies themselves. Both senses settled on the same double-m spelling in English, which is the small trap here: it is one 'm' in the middle, but doubled, and the ending is '-my', not '-mey' or '-mie'.

How the word is built

• mum (childish form of mother)
• -my (affectionate diminutive ending); the unrelated 'preserved body' sense is mumiya (embalmed corpse) with no internal parts