the.com/mom

means An informal term for mother, used by children and adults alike as a warm, everyday address.

from Pure baby-babble made permanent: nearly every language has some version of 'ma' or 'mama,' because it's one of the easiest sound combinations for infant mouths to produce — lips pressed together, then released on a hum. Linguists think the sound got adopted as the word for mother largely because babies made it so often, early, and insistently that mothers claimed it as their own. English 'mom' (and its cousins 'mum,' 'ma,' 'mommy') is just the latest spelling of that ancient baby hum, first showing up in print in the 1800s but almost certainly spoken long, long before anyone wrote it down.