child

Pronunciation

• IPA: /tʃaɪld/, plural /ˈtʃɪl.drᵊn/^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English child, inherited from Old English cild (“fetus, infant”),^[2][3][4] from Proto-Germanic *kiltham,^[2][5] a word that Hoad calls peculiar to English.^[5] Its closest relatives are Old English cildhama (“womb”), literally “child-home”, and Scandinavian words for a litter or brood such as Danish kuld and Swedish kull,^[2][3][6] and it has no certain relatives outside Germanic.^[2] Barnhart notes that Old High German kind (“child”) and its Old Frisian and Old Saxon equivalents cannot be satisfactorily connected with it.^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

A fetus, an infant, a newborn: Old English cild, about 750, in Cynewulf's Elene.^[3][2] Etymonline, following Buck, notes that it seems at first always to have been used in relation to the mother, as the fruit of the womb.^[2]

Semantic evolution

In late Old English child came to mean a young person before puberty, and also a youth of noble birth, the archaic childe.^[2] With child, “pregnant”, keeps the original sense, from the late 12th century, when child also came to mean one's own son or daughter, replacing Old English bearn.^[2] In the 16th and 17th centuries it was used especially of a girl, as in The Winter's Tale: “A boy or a child, I wonder?”^[7][2] The Old English plural was cild, like the singular, then cildru from about 975; adding the plural ending -en gave children about 1175, a double plural,^[3][2][5] while the older childre survives in dialect childer and in Childermas.^[2] Childish goes back to Old English cildisc, and childhood and childbed are probably from before 1200.^[3] Children should be seen and not heard was first said of young women: about 1400 it was already an old saying that “a maid should be seen, but not heard”.^[7]

Timeline

• c. 750 – Old English cild (Cynewulf).^[3]
• c. 975 – plural cildru.^[3]
• before 1000 – cildisc, childish.^[3]
• c. 1175 – child and the plural children.^[3]
• late 12th century – with child; one's offspring.^[2]
• c. 1350 – child's play.^[3]
• c. 1400 – “a maid should be seen, but not heard”.^[7]
• 16th–17th century – a girl.^[2]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. A person between birth and puberty.
2. An unborn or newborn baby.
3. A childish or immature person.
4. A son or daughter; offspring.
5. A person strongly shaped by a given time or place: a child of the sixties.
6. (archaic) A youth of noble birth.

Word family

• childless
• childlessness

Related words

• chield
• childe
• Childermas
• childhood
• childish
• children
• bairn

References

1. ^ Jones, Daniel (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 18th ed., ed. Peter Roach, Jane Setter and John Esling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin
5. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
7. ^ a b c Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press