Skip to content
OneKitly

godmother

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɡɒdmʌðə//

A woman present at the christening of a baby who promises to help raise the child in a Christian manner; a female godparent who sponsors the baptism of a child.

noun

  1. 1

    A woman present at the christening of a baby who promises to help raise the child in a Christian manner; a female godparent who sponsors the baptism of a child.

Etymology

From Middle English godmoder, from Old English godmōdor (“godmother”), equivalent to god- + mother. Cognate with Old High German gotmuoter (“godmother”), Old Norse guðmóðir (“godmother”), Icelandic guðmóður (“godmother”), Swedish gudmoder (“godmother”), Danish gudmor (“godmother”).

verb

  1. 1

    To act as godmother to.

    The servants took to her – as they say – she godmothered three Susans during her rule, the coachman's, the gardener's and the Up Hill gamekeeper's.

Forms

plural
godmothers
past tense
godmothered
past participle
godmothered
present participle
godmothering
third person singular
godmothers
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).