gestation

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin gestātiō (“a carrying”),^{[2][3][4][5][6]} a noun of action from the past participle stem of gestō (“to bear, carry, carry in the womb”),^[3][5][7] the frequentative of gerō (“to bear, carry”).^[3][4][8][9] The American Heritage Dictionary takes the word through Late Latin.^[8] The OED notes that the Latin noun was used especially of being carried as exercise, and compares French gestation, recorded in Cotgrave.^[2] The Latin verb has also given English congest, digest, gerund, gesture, jester, register and suggest.^[10] The verb gestate is a back-formation from gestation, recorded from 1866.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Being carried, on horseback, in a carriage or in a boat, as a form of exercise: 1541, in Elyot's Castel of Helthe;^[2] Barnhart dates the word to 1533 in the same book,^[4] and Etymonline to the 1530s.^[3] Ayto quotes William Bullein (1562): "Gestacion, that is to be carried of another thing, without any travail of the body itself".^[10]

Semantic evolution

The word first named a kind of passive exercise taken by being carried,^[2][10][11] a sense Trench illustrates with quotations from Elyot and Holland's Pliny, and which the OED now marks as rare.^[11][2] The sense that has become the main one, the carrying of young in the womb between conception and birth, is recorded from 1615, in Crooke's Mikrokosmographia.^[2][4][3] Browne used the word in 1646 for the wearing of a ring, a rare and obsolete sense.^[2] Johnson (1755) gave only the sense "the act of bearing the young in the womb", with quotations from Browne.^[12] By Trench's time (1859) it had become a technical word for the period during which animals carry their young.^[11] The figurative sense, the development of an idea or plan in the mind, dates from the late 17th century.^[5][8][13]

Timeline

• 1541 – being carried as a form of exercise.^[2] Barnhart dates it to 1533.^[4]
• 1615 – the carrying of young in the womb.^[2][4]
• 1646 – the wearing of a ring (obsolete).^[2]
• late 17th century – the development of an idea or plan in the mind.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. The carrying of young in the womb from conception to birth; pregnancy.^[8][14][2]
2. The development of an embryo during this time, or the length of the period: The gestation of a cat lasts about nine weeks.^[13][5]
3. The incubation of eggs.^[14]
4. The forming and development of an idea or plan in the mind, or the time this takes: The project had a long gestation.^[8][13][14]
5. (archaic) Exercise taken by being carried, as on horseback or in a carriage.^[14][2][5]

Word family

• gestatory
• gestational

Related words

• gestate
• gest
• gesture
• congest
• digest
• gerund
• jester
• register
• suggest

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b c d e f Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
7. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ a b c d e The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
9. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
11. ^ a b c Trench, Richard Chenevix (1859), A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from Their Present, London: John W. Parker
12. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
13. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
14. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster