Babeship

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Infancy; babyhood. archaic

    "Neither was he aſhamed to confeſſe that he had through errour doen amyſſe in many thinges, by reaſon that he had not euen from his tendre babeſhip ben nouſled in the preceptes of philoſophie."

  2. 2
    A baby. archaic

    "Saturn, for instance, is at least half a dozen times bigger than this world; is it not, then, natural to think, that if inhabited by rational beings, by "lords of the creation," as we pigmies style ourselves, that they should be six times bigger than us? therefore, a new born infant of a lady of Saturn, must be equal in size to our most stately full-grown gentlemen, and his babeship of six feet will be dandled about with the same ease by his lady-mother of thirty-six feet high , as one of our fair belles would handle the first product of her tender love, when the small he or she does not exceed eighteen inches."

Example

More examples

"Neither was he aſhamed to confeſſe that he had through errour doen amyſſe in many thinges, by reaſon that he had not euen from his tendre babeſhip ben nouſled in the preceptes of philoſophie."

Etymology

From babe + -ship.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.