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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

babe.

A baby or infant; a very young human or animal.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/beɪb/
  1. A baby or infant; a very young human or animal.

    literary · poetic
    These events came to pass when he was but a babe.
  2. An attractive person, especially a young woman.

    slang
    She's a real babe!
  3. A darling (a term of endearment).

    endearing
    Hey, babe, how's about you and me getting together?
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰā- Proto-Germanic *bō-redup. Proto-Germanic *babô Proto-West Germanic *babō Old English *baba Middle English babe 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”). cognates and related terms Related to Old Frisian bobba (“child”) (whence North Frisian babbe, babb, babe (“child”)), Old High German Babo (a male forename), 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.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.