midwife [ME] The original sense of midwife seems to have been ‘a woman who is with the mother’. Mid- here is not connected to middle, but is an old word meaning ‘with’ that is related to Greek meta ‘with’, which appears in English words beginning meta-, such as metabolism [L19th] from metabole ‘change’, metaphor [LME] from metapherein ‘to transfer’, and metaphysics [LME], referring to the works of Aristotle that were anthologized after (meta) his work on physics. ‘A woman’ (rather than ‘a married woman’) is the oldest sense of *wife, still used in Scotland.