Other forms: babes
A babe is a very young child. It is the old word for a baby and it survives mostly in fixed phrases and in older writing — babe in arms, the babes in the wood.
The live modern uses are quite different. Babe is an affectionate form of address between partners, like darling, and it is informal and can sound dated. And babe as a description of an attractive woman is dated slang and generally unwelcome. A learner should recognise all three and use only the first, which is safely literary. Note babe in arms, meaning a child too young to walk, which appears in official language about travel and seating.
1nounbabeA very young child, in older or literary use.
“A babe in arms cannot be left at the door.”
2nounaffectionateAn affectionate form of address.
“Thanks, babe.”
babe is a young child.
Middle English babe is probably imitative — the sound a baby makes — which is why so many languages have a word like it. Baby is the same word with a diminutive ending added, so a baby is literally a little babe.
Middle English
babe
English, today
babe
Built from
From Middle English babe. From Middle English babe, a variant of earlier baban, perhaps from Old English baba (“boy, child”), from Proto-West Germanic babō, from Proto-Germanic babô, reduplicated variant of ba-, bō- (“father, brother, close male relation”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA