Other forms: mothers
Your mother is the woman who gave birth to you. My mother, become a mother, her mother's house.
Mum in Britain and mom in America are what people actually say to her; mother is the formal word and the one used about her. As a verb, to mother somebody is to look after them protectively, sometimes too much so. Mother appears in many compounds: mother tongue, mother country, motherhood, mother-in-law, and Mother Nature. Note Mother's Day, which falls on different dates in Britain and America, and necessity is the mother of invention.
1nounmotherThe woman who gave birth to you.~98%
“Her mother still lives in the same street.”
synonyms: mum, mom, mama
2verblookTo look after somebody protectively.~2%
“She mothers the whole department and they let her.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
mother is a parent.
Also accepted in games: mom, mum, mama
Old English modor goes back to Proto-Indo-European mater, which survives across the family: Latin mater, Greek meter, Sanskrit matar. The English th where Latin has t is the regular Germanic shift, the same one that turns Latin tres into three.
Middle English
moder
English, today
mother
From Middle English moder. From Middle English moder, from Old English mōdor, from Proto-West Germanic mōder, from Proto-Germanic mōdēr, from Proto-Indo-European méh₂tēr. a doublet of Madeira and mata and mater and matrix and matter. Some have proposed that the "dregs" sense is from Middle Dutch modder (“filth”), from Proto-Germanic muþraz (“sediment”), but modder is not known in this meaning. On the other hand, words for "mother" have developed the secondary sense of "dregs" in several Romance and Germanic languages; compare Dutch moer, French mère de vinaigre, German Essigmutter, Italian madre, Medieval Latin māter, and Spanish madre.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA