Is one a sub group of the other? Does either term include toddlers?
I’m having this discussion with someone and we both thought the opposite from eachother and we were quite sure our way of thinking was the common understanding.
They are vague terms used in different ways in different contexts. Infant is generally on the younger end closer to birth and baby stretched out up to multiple years by some usage.
Newborn > infant > toddler with the option to call them a baby during all three. A child around a year old might be called an infant, baby, or even toddler.
Then don’t use baby again until they are in a relationship :P
That last got me, but you mixed > and <.
I used > as a directional arrow, not greater than as it wasn’t a comparison.
Although newborns are the best.
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Often the French word ends up having more fancy, haughty, or high-class connotation and the the Anglo Saxon word ends up having more of a working person’s connotation, since the Normans were the rulers of England and the Anglo Saxons their subjects. One popular example is that words like “Chicken”, “Cow”, “Sheep”, “Pig” are the word for the animal, whereas the French “Beef”, “Poultry”, “Mutton”, “Pork” are the words for their meat because the English were the farmers raising the animals but the French overlords were the ones eating their meat.
But because the words have been there for so long they’ve drifted into slightly different meanings, allowing more subtle communication.
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Blossom: the petals of a flower
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Flower: the whole flower (petals, stamen, stem, leaves)
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Fowl: birds you can eat, including alive in the wild
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Poultry: chicken, as farm animals, meat, or eggs
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Yeah I think this is the difference. I don’t have a strong second language so I think of infants being only the earliest stage of life. They speak some french where enfant is older than a bébé.
Baby can be older than an infant but also includes infancy.
Infants and babies are the same. Some people will continue calling their child a baby long after it is no longer a baby though. I have never seen someone continue to call their child an infant. So of the two, infant is more precise. A baby or infant will progress to become a toddler.
My BaBy Is 72 MoNtHs!1!!
There’s not a specific difference in most cases. But generally infant can be used outside of humans whereas baby is specifically a human child. And in some professional and scientific jargon infant is used to describe a specific phase of life.
