In honor of the mothers we celebrated this weekend, I wanted to explore where the word mother comes from.

Noticing some similarities between the English word mother and its counterparts in a few romance languages (mère or madre), I was guessing that the roots were Latin. I was wrong!

Mother
comes from the Middle English
moder
which comes from the Old English
modor
which comes from the Proto-Germanic
moder
which originates from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word for “mother”:
mater.

The PIE word mater was created based off one of the first syllables a child learns to say (ma, hence mama) paired with the PIE suffix denoting kinship (-ter): mater.

The reason Germanic words for “mother” are so similar to their Latin-based counterparts is because the PIE word mater is also the source of Latin’s mater. All these different languages and cultures evolved differently, but they all started in the same place, all based around baby talk!

In case you’re curious like I was, here are some examples (thanks to the Google machine) of the word for mother in different languages:

Germanic Languages:

German: Mutter
Dutch: moeder
Norwegian: mor
Swedish: mor

Romance (Latin-based) Languages:

French: mère
Portuguese: mãe
Italian: madre
Spanish: madre

Happy Word Nerd Wednesday and Happy Belated Mother’s Day! Don’t forget to comment with any words you’d like to see explored in upcoming weeks either in the comments below or on Instagram.

Reference

Online Etymology Dictionary: Mother
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=mother