Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Mother.
from The Century Dictionary.
- A Middle English form of
mo . - noun A sling used by Polynesian islanders, made from finely braided fibers of cocoanut-husk or of similar material.
- In music, but: used especially in the phrase ma non troppo, but not too much, to limit various indications of musical tempo and style, as allegro ma non troppo, quick, but not too much so, etc.
- noun An abbreviation of
Master of Applied Science . - noun A shorter or childish form of
mama .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A child's word for mother.
- noun In Oriental countries, a respectful form of address given to a woman; mother.
- conjunction (Mus.) But; -- used in cautionary phrases.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- initialism astronomy milli-
arcsecond - noun colloquial, and in direct address
Mother ,mama . - abbreviation
May
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun informal terms for a mother
- noun a state in New England; one of the original 13 colonies
- noun one thousandth of an ampere
- noun a master's degree in arts and sciences
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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_Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma_, the Chinese stammeringly say, and if the pitch and tone of each _ma_ are right, the meaning of the apparent repetition is, "Does Mother scold the horses, or will the horses scold Mother?"
Beard 2010
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Was it not Scarron who wrote a poem, 'A Guillemette, chienne de ma soeur, 'but quarrelling with his sister just as the volume was about to appear, put in the _errata_,' For _chienne de ma soeur_ read _ma chienne de soeur_ '!
The Book-Hunter at Home P. B. M. Allan
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"_C'est drole! c'est ma maison_ -- _ma maison veritable_!"
The Quadroon Adventures in the Far West Mayne Reid 1850
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Guillemette, Chienne de ma Soeur_; but having a quarrel with his sister, he maliciously put into the _errata_, "Instead of _Chienne de ma Soeur_, read _ma Chienne de Soeur_."
Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) Isaac Disraeli 1807
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Napoli e Maradona = un amore infinito! ma c'amma fa cu stu S. Paolo..foss S. Gennar..ma quanto vorrei che il mio stadio s chiammass
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Napoli e Maradona = un amore infinito! ma c'amma fa cu stu S. Paolo..foss S. Gennar..ma quanto vorrei che il mio stadio s chiammass
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a resemblance to each other, and then also commences for them that annoyance to which so many English children have been subjected, from generation to generation down to our time: the difficulty of knowing when to say _mon_ and _ma_ -- "kaunt dewunt dire moun et ma" -- that is how to distinguish the genders.
A Literary History of the English People From the Origins to the Renaissance Jean Jules Jusserand
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Because sao cook has the same pronunciation as the word for an older woman, when Chinese hear the term "ma da sao," they usually picture a housewife.
CNN.com 2011
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And, in fact, out in California, a lot of the women I spoke to out there seem to have, you know, a particular antipathy towards the term ma'am.
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Egyptian government was highly centralized and society strictly hierarchical: proper order in the kingdom, expressed by the term ma ` at, was thought to ensure national well-being.
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This coincidence gives rise to an ephemeral condition called ma, which is so elusive as to set it beyond translation (the frequently used ‘negative space’ simply will not do).
John Burnside · A Winter Mind · LRB 25 April 2013 John Burnside 2019
gulyasrobi commented on the word ma
"ma" in Hungaroian means: today
August 7, 2012