maternity

Other forms of maternity

plural

maternities·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about maternity

What does maternity mean?

maternity means "the state of being pregnant; the period from conception to birth when a woman carries a developing fetus in her uterus". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in maternity?

maternity has 4 syllables: ma-ter-ni-ty. The stress falls on "ter". In IPA it is /məˈtɝnɪti/.

What is another word for maternity?

Close synonyms include pregnancy, gestation, motherhood, motherliness, maternalism. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is maternity a common word?

maternity is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with maternity?

1 word rhymes with maternity. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.