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Allin

babysitter

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbeɪ̯biˌsɪtə//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈbe̞ɪ̯bɪi̯ˌsɪtʰə]/
  • United States//ˈbeɪ̯biˌsɪtɚ//
  • United States/[ˈbeɪ̯bɪi̯ˌsɪɾɚ]/
  • Australia//ˈbæ̝ɪ̯biˌsɪtɚ//

A person who cares for one or more babies or children for a short period of time in place of their legal guardians.

noun

  1. 1

    A person who cares for one or more babies or children for a short period of time in place of their legal guardians.

    My neighbor is sometimes a babysitter for other mothers’ children.

  2. 2

    A person who has to watch or attend to anything or anyone unnecessarily closely; a coddler or handholder.

    He said he did not want to be on tenterhooks worrying about us and having to act as a babysitter for grown men.

Etymology

From baby + sitter.

Forms

plural
babysitters
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).