baby

The earliest English speakers who called their infants 'babe' were doing something language does often: borrowing a sound from the thing being named. An infant's first vocalizations in many languages involve the consonants b, m, and p, because these require only the lips. 'Baba,' 'mama,' 'papa' appear with minor variations in languages from Mandarin to Swahili to Finnish, because the newborn mouth produces them almost automatically. 'Babe,' first attested in English around 1300, is almost certainly one of these imitative forms.

The diminutive suffix '-y' or '-ie' was productive in Middle English, creating affectionate small versions of words. 'Babe' became 'baby' through this process, and the word appears by 1377 in William Langland's Piers Plowman. Langland used it to describe an infant in a manger scene, the word already carrying the softness that surrounds small children in language. The same suffix gives English 'birdie,' 'doggy,' and 'kitty,' words where the ending does a kind of emotional work on its own.

By the 16th century, 'baby' had extended beyond infants to become a term of endearment between adults. Shakespeare used it in this sense, and it appeared in love poetry of the period. The word also gathered metaphorical meanings: anything small, fragile, or new could be a 'baby.' 'Baby teeth' appeared as a phrase in the 17th century, 'baby shower' in the 19th. The word was generalizing, moving from a specific human category to a quality things could have.

In the early 20th century, American jazz and blues musicians adopted 'baby' as a direct term of address, pouring it into lyrics from Chicago to New Orleans. By mid-century it had become a transatlantic export, carried globally by American popular music and film. The word traveled from an imitative babbling sound to a marker of intimacy and cool, all within six centuries. It is now among the most recognized English words in any language.