Eldmother

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An elderly woman regarded as the ancestral mother of a family, lineage or people
2. A venerable female ancestor who stands at the head of a line of descendants
3. The oldest matriarch of a clan, honored as the source from which later generations sprang

Etymology: "Eldmother" is an old word for grandmother, and its parts are plain: "eld" is an older form of "old," and "mother" is the familiar word for a parent. In Old English, "eald mōdor" meant grandmother, so the compound simply joined "old" and "mother" to name a parent's mother. The term passed into Middle English as "eldmoder" and kept its place for centuries alongside other ways of naming grandparents. The word survived longest in Scots, where "eldmother" and "eldmoder" came to mean mother-in-law, a shift in sense that the source records. Its Old Frisian relative "aldemōder" shows that the compound was not peculiar to English but was shared among the closely related North Sea languages.