means The state of being a mother, with all the caretaking, love, and responsibility that comes with raising a child.

from Built from "mother" plus the suffix "-hood," which marks a state or condition — the same "-hood" you find in childhood, knighthood, and neighborhood. That suffix traces back to Old English "hād," meaning a person's rank, state, or quality, once a standalone word. "Mother" itself is among the oldest words we have, with cousins across the Indo-European family — Latin "mater," Greek "mētēr," Sanskrit "mātṛ" — many possibly echoing the early "ma" sound infants make. So the word is, fittingly, ancient: a state of being named after the first word a baby tends to say.