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Added 9 October 2026

baba

/ˈbɑːbɑː/ noun

noun Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). Pronunciation from Wiktionary, via Kaikki.org. More about baba at Wordnik → Where our words come from →

A kind of sponge cake soaked in rum-flavoured syrup.
A grandmother.
An old woman, especially a traditional old woman from an Eastern European culture.

Origin

As one of the first utterances many babies are able to say, baba (like mama, papa, and dada) has come to be used in many languages as a term for various family members: * father: Albanian, Arabic, Western Armenian, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Greek, Marathi, Marshallese, Mingrelian, Nepali, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, Yoruba, Shona, Zulu * grandmother: many Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian, Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Polish; a doublet of bubbe), Romanian, Yiddish, Japanese * grandfather: Azerbaijani, Zulu (father, grandfather) * baby: Afrikaans, Sinhala, Hungarian These terms often continue to be used by English speakers whose families came from one of these cultures.

From Wiktionary, via Kaikki.org (CC BY-SA)

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