Womb

How to spell womb

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce womb

What does womb mean?

1. nounThe organ in a woman or female mammal in which a baby or young develops before birth.

Womb in a sentence

• The scan showed a healthy baby growing in the womb.

• Doctors monitored the position of the foetus inside the womb.

Where does womb come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending from the Old English wamb (also spelled womb), which originally meant the belly or stomach in general rather than the specific organ of pregnancy. It shares ancestry with the Old Norse vomb and the German Wanst, all from a Germanic root referring to the abdomen. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed from the whole belly to the particular hollow organ in which offspring develop. The troublesome silent -b at the end was never strongly pronounced and survives only in the spelling, much as it does in the related-looking words comb, tomb, and bomb. That cluster of -mb words is exactly why the spelling trips people up: the b is invisible to the ear but essential on the page.

How the word is built

• womb (from Old English wamb: belly, stomach), preserved with a silent -b