midwife

1 of 2

noun

mid·​wife ˈmid-ˌwīf How to pronounce midwife (audio)
1
: a person who assists women in childbirth compare nurse-midwife
2
: one that helps to produce or bring forth something

midwife

2 of 2

verb

midwifed ˈmid-ˌwīft How to pronounce midwife (audio) or midwived ˈmid-ˌwīvd How to pronounce midwife (audio) ; midwifing ˈmid-ˌwī-fiŋ How to pronounce midwife (audio) or midwiving ˈmid-ˌwī-viŋ How to pronounce midwife (audio)

transitive verb

: to assist in producing, bringing forth, or bringing about

Examples of midwife in a Sentence

Noun a trained and certified midwife
Recent Examples on the Web
Noun
Sam Sewell, a licensed and certified professional midwife who has served clients across the D.C. region, previously told The Washington Post that the Williamses’ predicament is unsurprising. Ellie Silverman, Washington Post, 5 Mar. 2024 Jeffrey, with the help of a midwife, delivered their son. Audrey Schmidt, Peoplemag, 5 Mar. 2024 On a recent afternoon in an RHA clinic, a midwife crouched by a patient in the waiting room with a Haitian Creole translator at her side. Whitney Eulich, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 Mar. 2024 Jenny left her job as a midwife in London for a career in a Marie Curie cancer hospice. Dina Kaur, The Arizona Republic, 28 Feb. 2024 Detective presents a counterargument in characters like Kayla, a sharp nursing student and devoted mother who stands up for her family, and Annie, a dedicated midwife who protests the local mine poisoning the water with deadly consequences. Toni Fitzgerald, Forbes, 16 Feb. 2024 Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 18 Jan. 2024 For Tamar’s birth in March 2020, Teresa and Jeff had a midwife, birth assistant, doula and friend to support them. Ellie Silverman, Washington Post, 15 Feb. 2024 In 2022, Hogan vetoed legislation allowing nurse practitioners, midwives and other non-physician medical professionals to perform abortions in Maryland. Jeff Barker, Baltimore Sun, 14 Feb. 2024
Verb
Gottlieb also greatly admired industriousness as a characteristic, Lizzie says; to that end, the man who midwifed the work of Robert Caro and Salman Rushdie also collected 3-D dog posters, obscure Barbie dolls and macramé owls. Richard Barnes, New York Times, 22 Dec. 2023 In retrospect, midwifing Panera’s birth looks like a happy heroic tale of breakthroughs and innovations. Ron Shaich, Fortune, 27 Oct. 2023 Again and again, what seems like uniform storytelling is revealed to be an assemblage of fragments, born from defeat and midwifed by division. Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 21 Aug. 2023 Danny DeVito’s character Bruce Davis is likely a nod to Marc Davis, one of the last Imagineers to midwife the Haunted Mansion to completion. Vulture, 31 July 2023 In the period from 2014 to 2019, the United States appeared poised to once again midwife a Kurdish entity, this one under different circumstances and with less far-reaching powers, in Syria. Henri J. Barkey, Foreign Affairs, 16 Oct. 2019 But at the very center of the American Covid experience, amid all the death and suffering and despite the dysfunction that midwifed it into being, sits what would have stood out, in any previous era, as an astonishing biomedical miracle: the coronavirus vaccines. David Wallace-Wells, New York Times, 23 June 2023 And now, The Blob may have helped midwife a record-breaking bloom of algae stretching from Southern California all the way north to Alaska. Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 6 Aug. 2015 The idea of the market as a communion of souls was once the lingua franca of European culture, helping to midwife the birth of economics from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Corey Robin, The New York Review of Books, 17 Nov. 2022

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'midwife.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Etymology

Noun

Middle English midwif, from mid with (from Old English) + wif woman

First Known Use

Noun

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Verb

1638, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of midwife was in the 14th century

Dictionary Entries Near midwife

Cite this Entry

“Midwife.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/midwife. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Kids Definition

midwife

noun
mid·​wife
ˈmid-ˌwīf
: a woman who helps other women in childbirth

Medical Definition

midwife

noun
mid·​wife ˈmid-ˌwīf How to pronounce midwife (audio)
: a person who assists women in childbirth see nurse-midwife

More from Merriam-Webster on midwife

Last Updated: - Updated example sentences
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