- 1助產師（民間也說助產士；獨立醫事人員，不一定是護理師）
A midwife is a person specially trained to care for a woman during pregnancy and to help when the baby is being born. Dictionaries often say 'a kind of nurse,' and many midwives did train as nurses first — though actually in a lot of countries, including Taiwan, midwife is its own profession, with its own licence, not just a nickname for a nurse. There are men in the job too, even though the old word has wife in it. That wife is an old English word for 'woman,' not 'married partner,' and mid here means 'with' (like German mit): the person who is with the woman. Scholars are not entirely sure whether it first meant 'the woman who attends' or 'the ones who stand with the mother.' Either way, it is not 'middle wife' and not 'the wife in the middle.' The verb to midwife — to help something be born, even an idea — grew from this, but this entry is the person. Formal enough for hospitals; also a warm, trusted word in families.
From the word’s history
Middle English midwif: mid 'with' + wif 'woman'; it is unclear whether 'with-woman' meant the helper or the one with the mother.
中古英文 mid「和…一起」加 wif「女人」，有一說指陪著產婦的人。
組成From Middle English midwif: mid ('with') + wif ('woman, wife, female'). It is not mid as in 'middle.' It is not entirely clear whether the first idea was 'the attending woman' or 'those who are with the mother.'
同家族的字
- wifesame old word wif, which meant 'woman' — not 'married partner' in the modern sense
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
midwifenoun/ˈmɪd.waɪf/
- 1
A person, usually a woman, who is trained to assist women in childbirth, but who is not a physician.
- A hundred years ago, a midwife would bring the baby into the world - going to a hospital to deliver a baby was either impossible or unheard of.
- Modernly, a hospital midwife is usually a registered nurse.
- 2
rareSomeone who assists in bringing about some result or project.
- He had not read it, but he said that every detail in it was true. This struck me as a rather cavalier attitude to truth, but hatred is not the midwife of caution or accuracy.
midwifeverb/ˈmɪd.waɪf/
- 1
To act as a midwife.
- 2
To facilitate the emergence of.
- But the bigger objective was to help Iraqis midwife a democratic model that could inspire reform across the Arab-Muslim world and give the youth there a chance at a better future.
- In the mid-1960s, Reichism was midwifed into reexistence by such stalwarts as William Schutz, Bernard Gunther, Charlotte Selver, Alexander Lowen, Ida Rolf, and many other exponents of human knead needs.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。