Stepmoms

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Women who are married to a person's father but are not their biological mothers; female parental figures acquired through remarriage; women assuming a maternal role in blended families
2. Females who become a mother by marrying someone with children from a previous relationship; surrogate maternal figures in non-biological family settings; women acting in the caregiving position for a partner’s offspring
3. Women entering a family through marriage to a father, acting as caregivers without biological ties; female guardians in second-marriage family dynamics; mothers by law or custom rather than by birth within a family unit

Etymology: "Stepmoms" is simply the plural of "stepmom," so the history belongs to its two parts. The first, "step-," descends from an Old English word, "stēop," meaning "bereaved" or "orphaned." Its forms in Middle English shifted toward "step," and the prefix came to mark a relationship created by a parent's remarriage rather than by birth, as in "stepson" and "stepfather." The second part, "mom," is an informal American-English shortening of "mother," the sort of clipped family term that developed in everyday speech. Put together, "stepmom" follows the same pattern as the older "stepmother," but its informal ring shows it belongs to casual, spoken family talk. The plural adds only an "-s," so "stepmoms" refers to more than one such woman in the way "stepmothers" does.

Synonyms: stepmothers, bonus moms, blended family moms, second moms, surrogate moms

Antonyms: biological moms, birth mothers, real moms