babe

Meaning

Noun

• A baby or infant; a very young human or animal.
• An attractive person, especially a young woman.
• Darling .

Related

Similar words

• baby, child, infant
• darling, dear, love, sweetheart

Origin

• From Middle English babe, a variant of earlier baban, perhaps from Old English *baba ("boy, child"), from Proto-Germanic *babô, reduplicated variant of *ba-, *bō-.
• Related to Old Frisian bobba ("child"), Old High German Babo, see boy. Otherwise, origin obscure. Compare mama, dada, papa. Welsh baban ("baby"), believed by Skeat to be a mutation of maban, a diminutive of mab ("son"), is probably rather a borrowing from English. Cognate also with English bub#Etymology_3.