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Maternity   /mətˈərnɪti/   Listen
noun
Maternity  n.  
1.
The state of being a mother; motherhood.
2.
The character of a mother; maternal quality; motherliness.
3.
The maternity ward; the maternity department of a hospital.


adjective
maternity  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to childbirth or the period during which a woman is pregnant; as, maternity care; a maternity hospital.
2.
For use during pregnancy; as, a maternity outfit.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Maternity" Quotes from Famous Books



... singular perversion of the natural instincts of maternity sometimes occurs among the pigs which are allowed to roam together in herds, it seems to be far more common in those conditions where the animals are confined in pens without contact with their kind, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... handled many maternity cases can call to mind instances where every condition was present to perfection, for the production of maternal impression, on the time-honored lines. None occurred. Most mothers can, if they give the matter careful consideration, duplicate this experience from their ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... looked up with an expression of worldly interest. Dr. Duchesne had brought her two children into the world with some difficulty, and had skillfully attended her through a long illness consequent upon the inefficient maternity of soulful but fragile American women of her type. The doctor had more than a mere local reputation as a surgeon, and Mrs. Rivers looked up to him as her sole connecting link with a world of thought beyond ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... never make a new word til we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,—this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,—must throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house with ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart


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