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English has two words mummy. The one meaning ‘mother’ [19], although not recorded in print until comparatively recently, is one of a range of colloquial ‘mother’-words, such as mama and mammy, that go back ultimately to the syllable ma, imitative of a suckling baby (see MAMMAL and MOTHER), and was probably common in dialect speech much earlier. The 19th century saw its adoption into the general language. The abbreviation mum [19] has a parallel history. The Egyptian mummy [14] comes ultimately from Arabic mūmiyā ‘embalmed body’, a derivative of mūm ‘embalming wax’, but when it first arrived in English (via medieval Latin mumia and Old French mumie) it was used for a ‘medicinal ointment prepared from mummified bodies’ (‘Take myrrh, sarcocol [a gum-resin], and mummy … and lay it on the nucha [spinal cord]’, Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie, c. 1400). The word’s original sense ‘embalmed body’ did not emerge in English until the early 17th century.
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