# babe

Pronunciation: say "BAYB" /beɪb/

## Noun

1. An affectionate form of address, used like darling.
   - Simple: A warm, loving name you call someone, like darling.
   - _Don't worry, babe, we'll figure this out together._
   - _Hey, babe, want to grab a coffee before the movie starts?_
2. A good-looking person, especially a young woman. *(slang)*
   - Simple: A person who is nice to look at, most often a young woman.
   - _According to half the office, the new guy in accounting is a total babe._
   - _The film's poster was all fast cars and bikini-clad babes._
3. An infant or baby; more broadly, any human or animal in its earliest stage of life. *(literary)*
   - Simple: A baby, or any very young person or animal.
   - _She rocked the sleeping babe in her arms until dawn._
   - _In spring the ewes stood guard over their newborn babes._

## Origin

Middle English babe was a variant of the earlier baban, which perhaps came from Old English *baba ("boy, child"). Behind that lie Proto-West Germanic *babō and Proto-Germanic *babô, a reduplicated form of *ba-, *bō-, which referred to a father, brother or close male relation. Old Frisian bobba ("child") is related, but beyond that the origin is obscure. Compare mama, dada and papa.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/babe (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).