November 19, 1997

materteral

Can you help me out with this one: What is the word I am looking for to describe someone acting like an aunt would? "Uncle" is to "avuncular" as "aunt" is to what? I know that English is ludicrously devoid of kinship terms, but surely there is the right word out there somewhere. What is it?

Materteral.

Hey, I never said it was common, but that's what it is. Materteral is based on the Latin word matertera 'maternal aunt; mother's sister'. Latin distinguished 'mother's sister' from 'father's sister' (amita); it similarly distinguished 'mother's brother' (avunculus, from which we get our word avuncular) from 'father's brother' (patruus). In the modern Romance languages there are only two terms, 'parent's brother' (e.g. French oncle) and 'parent's sister' (e.g. French tante), like English.

There is but a single example of materteral in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1823; this is, surprisingly, earlier than the earliest known example of avuncular (1831), the difference being that avuncular is rather widely used, but materteral, which the OED describes as "humorously pedantic," seems to exist for the sole purpose of allowing the question "What's the word for 'like an aunt'?" to be answered.