Late Middle English: probably imitative of an infant's first attempts at speech.

• Both baby and babe probably come from the way that the sound ba is repeated by very young children. Babble (Middle English) probably came from the same source, along with words such as mama (mid 16th century) and papa (late 17th century). Similar forms are found in many different languages. A person's lover or spouse has been their baby since the middle of the 19th century. The sense ‘someone's creation or special concern’ dates from later in that century—in 1890 artificial silk was referred to as its inventor's ‘new-born baby’. The proverb don't throw the baby out with the bathwater is from German. The first known appearance in English is from the Scottish historian and political philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who wrote in 1853 that ‘The Germans say, “You must empty out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it”.’ Babe originally just meant ‘child’, and only later became restricted to a child too young to walk. Inexperienced people in a situation calling for experience are babes in the wood, from characters in an old ballad The Children in the Wood, whose wicked uncle wanted to steal their inheritance and abandoned them in a wood. The proverbial phrase out of the mouths of babes is used when a precocious child says something unexpectedly appropriate. It has biblical origins, being found in Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew. A babe today is generally an attractive young person. The first babes were men. In the 1870s the youngest member of a class of US military cadets was called the babe, rather like ‘the baby of the family’. The term was then used as a friendly form of address between men before it came to mean a sexy girl. See also bimbo