baby [LME] Both baby and babe probably come from the way that the sound ba is repeated by very young children. Babble [ME] probably came from the same source, along with words such as mama [M16th] and papa [L17th]. Similar forms are found in many different languages. A person’s lover or spouse has been their baby since the late 17th century. The sense ‘someone’s creation or special concern’ is late 19th century. The proverb don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater [M19th] is from a German saying. Babe could originally just mean ‘child’ and only later became restricted to a child too young to walk. Babes in the wood comes from characters in a 1595 ballad The Norfolk Tragedy, whose wicked uncle wanted to steal their inheritance and abandoned them in a wood. The first allusive use is recorded from 1795. 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 often an attractive young woman [E20th]. 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 female. See also bimbo.