Remarkably, in almost every language on earth the word for mother tends to contain the sound ‘m’. As well as all of the familiar English forms like mum, ma, mom and mama, the m trend continues into languages as diverse as Welsh (mam), Icelandic (mó∂ir), Latin (mater), Hebrew (em), Vietnamese (me), Navajo (ama) and even Ancient Egyptian (mwt). This association is by no means a random one, however, as the ‘m’ sound is one of the easiest of all sounds to produce and thus one of the earliest to develop in the first vocalisations of babies, which would understandably become attached to its closest parent very early in its infancy.
The zoological adjective altricial describes young creatures – and in particular birds – that are completely helpless after birth and remain confined to their nest, reliant on their parents’ care, until they have developed enough to leave. Dating from the mid-nineteenth century, the word is derived from the Latin word for ‘foster-mother’ or ‘wet nurse’, altrix, which is in turn the feminine form of the Latin word for ‘keeper’ or ‘feeder’, altor. The root of all of these terms is the verb alere, meaning ‘to nourish’, from which several other English words – including alimony, alumnus and alimentary, as in alimentary canal, another name for the digestive tract – are all similarly derived.
Dating from as far back as the fifteenth century, in its earliest appearance in English the word beldam was used to mean ‘grandmother’, but in later use was applied more generally to any aged female relative or woman, or else was used depreciatively of an old hag or witch; the derivative beldamship, essentially meaning ‘grandmother-hood’, dates from the mid-1600s. The word beldam itself is formed from two long-obsolete English terms: bel, an old prefix historically used to denote some kind of relationship or kinship, and dame, a Middle English word for ‘mother’.
Cummer is an old fourteenth-century English name for a godmother, although over time it has also come to be used to describe a gossip or confidante, or else as a general term of address for a young woman. It is one of a number of comparable English words, including com-mother, kimmer and comered, all of which are related to the equivalent Latin term commater, formed from the prefix com-, meaning ‘together’ or ‘with’, and mater, meaning ‘mother’.
Genetrix is a Latin word essentially meaning ‘mother’, often with the implication of a ‘creator’ or ‘ancestor’, and as such is descended from the same root – gignere, a Latin verb meaning ‘to give birth’ – as words like generate, genesis, ingénue and progeny. In English, genetrix was first used in the mid-1500s as a more formal name for a person’s mother, but over time this meaning has broadened and today it is also figuratively used to refer to a person’s native country or background.
The word mammal is a surprisingly recent addition to the English language, recorded no earlier than 1813. It is derived from the Latin taxonomic term Mammalia, coined in 1758 by the Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus for use in his monumental work Systema Naturae, which established the so-called Linnaean system still used today to classify all living things. Linnaeus took his term Mammalia from the Latin word for ‘breast’, mamma (as found in similar words such as mammary and mammogram), and used it to classify all vertebrate creatures that produce milk to suckle their young. In Latin, mamma was also used as a child’s informal term for its mother, and is ultimately another example of the ancient and instinctive association of the m sound to refer to the female parent.
First recorded in English in Ben Jonson’s 1601 play Cynthia’s Revels, a mammothrept is a spoilt child or, by extension, someone with poor judgement or knowledge due to their immaturity or inexperience. Whether or not the word was coined by Jonson himself is unclear, but either way the term has seemingly been adopted from the Ancient Greek mammothreptos, a compound of the Greek mamme, meaning ‘mother’, and trephein, meaning ‘to bring up’ or ‘to nourish’, which was used to refer to a child brought up by its grandmother.
Originating during the First World War, marraines – or the marraines de guerre – were French women who effectively acted as pen pals to troops serving on the front line in German-occupied France. The marraine de guerre scheme was established in 1915 and was quickly taken up by the French press who encouraged women to ‘adopt’ a soldier, principally by sending him encouraging letters and parcels of food and other gifts, as an act of patriotism and to help maintain morale amongst troops with no means of contacting their own families. The word marraine itself literally means ‘godmother’ in French and is ultimately a derivation of the Latin mater.
The word matrix has a vast number of different meanings and uses in English, most of which tend to carry some sense of connectivity or supportiveness. As well as an interconnected system or network of individual elements, a matrix can be the rock in which a fossil or gemstone is buried; an original sound recording from which copies are made; the bed of a finger or toenail, from where the new nail grows; a clause which contains a subordinate clause; a mould from which something is cast; or the recess into which a metal effigy or trophy is mounted. The earliest of all of the word’s meanings, however, dates from as far back as the early 1400s in English, when matrix was used as another name for the womb of an animal. In this context, it derived from an Old French term for a pregnant animal, matris, which is in turn a derivative of the Latin mater, meaning ‘mother’.
The word matter was first recorded in English as early as the thirteenth century. It was adopted into the language via French from the earlier Latin word materia, which could variously be used to refer to the material from which something is made, to timber or other building materials, or to the innermost and strongest wood of a tree. The root of all of these words is the Latin mater, meaning ‘mother’, which in this sense is used figuratively to refer to the supportive source from which something is made or developed.
The word metropolis literally means ‘mother city’ and is derived from the two Greek words, meter and polis, the latter of which was originally used to describe a city-state in Ancient Greece. Despite these origins – and the word’s most familiar use today for any large sprawling city – the word’s earliest recorded use in English was as an ecclesiastical term describing the see of a so-called metropolitan bishop, a high-ranking official in the Christian Church who presided over all of the other bishops of the surrounding province from a central seat.