I have a friend who wonders when “mom” turned into a plain old noun instead of a name, as in “My mom drinks coffee” vs. “Hey, Mom, would you like some coffee?” I can’t remember a time in my life when “mom” wasn’t a noun, so I checked at the Google Ngram Viewer which lets you chart the use of words throughout Google Book’s entire corpus of tens of millions of books. Here’s the result:

So, it looks like the two track each other pretty well, at least in books.

The Ngram does show a serious uptick for both in the early 1940s. But before you go hypothesizing that during WWII we started writing about our mothers more, here’s the Ngram for Mother and mother:

The Mom/mom upturn was really just a blip when compared to the mammoth of Mother/mother. So, I dunno. (But we can conclude that Mother is the mother of all moms.)

I tried the same search, but for “Ma” and “ma”:

Ma and ma again seem to be in sync. But for some reason in 1986, for the first time Mom beat Ma.

Fascinating? You tell me.

Categories: culture dw