Other forms: midwives
A midwife is the trained professional who looks after a woman through pregnancy and delivers the baby. In a straightforward birth the midwife is the one in the room — checking, timing, telling you when to push — with no doctor needed at all.
The plural is midwives and the profession is midwifery. You meet a community midwife on home visits and a hospital midwife on the ward, and a midwife-led unit is one run without doctors on hand. A midwife is not a nurse and not a doctor: it is a separate qualification with its own training and its own authority. Not every midwife is a woman, whatever the shape of the word suggests. There is a figurative use worth having as well — you can midwife an agreement or a project into existence, meaning you helped bring it into the world without being its parent.
1nounmidwifeA trained professional who cares for women through pregnancy and delivers babies.
“The midwife arrived at two in the morning and stayed until it was light.”
2verbhelpTo help bring something into existence.
“She midwifed the deal through six months of talks.”
midwife is a trained health professional.
Midwife is Middle English midwif, from mid, which then meant 'with', plus wif, 'woman'. What has never been settled is which woman it points at: the with-woman who attends the birth, or the one who is with the woman giving birth. English later lost that sense of mid, which is why the word now looks like a riddle it never was.
Middle English
midwif
English, today
midwife
Built from
From Middle English midwif, corresponding to mid (“with”) + wif (“woman, wife, female”). It appears not to be entirely clear whether the original understanding was “with-woman” in the sense of “attending/assisting woman”, or “they who are with the woman” (namely the mother).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA