Britt Peterson, “What ‘Mom’ Really Means in America” (Boston Globe, May 11, 2014)
“Mom” and “mommy” began appearing in the mid 19th century, part of a slew of variations, including mam, mum, and marm, that pop up in dialect and casual written language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English. “Marm” would’ve usually been pronounced without the “r,” said Ben Zimmer, linguist and producer of Visual Thesaurus—and a former writer of this column—meaning that “Little Women”’s Marmee was probably an early namesake of today’s mommies.
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