aunt
pronunciation
How to pronounce aunt in British English:
UK [ɑːnt]
How to pronounce aunt in American English:
US [ænt]
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- Noun:
- the sister of your father or mother; the wife of your uncle
Word Origin
- aunt
- aunt: [13] Aunt appears to come ultimately from *amma, a hypothetical non-Indo-European word for ‘mother’ (parallel to Indo-European *mammā, and like it reproducing syllables perceived to be uttered by babies), which at some point was borrowed into Latin. It first appears in the derived form amita ‘paternal aunt’, which passed into English via Old French ante (of which modern French tante is an alternation) and Anglo-Norman aunte.
- aunt (n.)
- c. 1300, from Anglo-French aunte, Old French ante (Modern French tante, from a 13c. variant), from Latin amita "paternal aunt" diminutive of *amma a baby-talk word for "mother" (cognates: Greek amma "mother," Old Norse amma "grandmother," Middle Irish ammait "old hag," Hebrew em, Arabic umm "mother"). Extended senses include "an old woman, a gossip" (1580s); "a procuress" (1670s); and "any benevolent woman," in American English, where auntie was recorded since c. 1790 as "a term often used in accosting elderly women." The French word also has become the word for "aunt" in Dutch, German (Tante), and Danish. Swedish has retained the original Germanic (and Indo-European) custom of distinguishing aunts by separate terms derived from "father's sister" (faster) and "mother's sister" (moster). The Old English equivalents were faðu and modrige. In Latin, too, the formal word for "aunt on mother's side" was matertera. Some languages have a separate term for aunts-in-law as opposed to blood relations.
Antonym
Example
- 1. My aunt received mediocre scores on her sat tests .
- 2. One day the aunt had the most terrible toothache .
- 3. That 's my uncle . That 's my aunt .
- 4. My aunt helped me make them .
- 5. She might have been an intellectual like her aunt , but she was barely educated .