Word.ws English Dictionary

motherkin

motherkin noun: fond term of address for one's mother.

Noun

motherkin (plural motherkins)

  1. (dated) Fond term of address for one's mother.
  2. (dated) Fond term of address for a woman older than the speaker
    • "Motherkin," I answered, "what I mean is that I would sleep until I wake, for I have come a prodigious distance and have last slept in the woods […]"1902, Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

Forms of motherkin

pluralmotherkins

Origin of motherkin

From mother + -kin.

Questions about motherkin

What does motherkin mean?
Motherkin means fond term of address for one's mother.
What part of speech is motherkin?
Motherkin is a noun.
What is the plural of motherkin?
The plural of motherkin is motherkins.

Words near motherkin in the dictionary

  1. motherings
  2. motherish
  3. motherism
  4. motherist
  5. motherists
  6. motherkin
  7. motherkins
  8. motherland
  9. motherlands
  10. motherless
  11. motherlessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: motherkin (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “motherkin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/motherkin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.