The word mummy entered English in the 15th century, arriving through a chain of borrowings that stretches from Persian through Arabic and Latin. The ultimate source is Persian mum, meaning wax. From this, Arabic formed mumiya, which originally referred to bitumen or an embalming substance, the dark, waxy material used to preserve corpses. Medieval Latin adopted this as mumia, and from Latin the word passed into Old French and then into English. The critical semantic shift occurred along this route: the word moved from describing the preserving material to describing the preserved body itself.
The Persian word mum (wax) is the deepest recoverable root. Persian belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, and mum is an old word within Iranian, though its own deeper etymology is uncertain. The Arabs borrowed the word to describe the dark, resinous substance they found on or in Egyptian preserved bodies, which they identified as bitumen. The Arabic form mumiya thus referred primarily to the embalming material, and only secondarily to the body coated in it.
When the word reached Medieval Latin as mumia, the semantic center of gravity shifted decisively. European writers used mumia to mean the preserved corpse, and this became the standard sense in European languages. The English form mummy, first attested in the 1400s, has always referred primarily to the body rather than the substance.
This shift was driven partly by a remarkable chapter in the history of European medicine. From roughly the 12th through the 17th centuries, powdered mummy was a valued ingredient in European pharmacopoeia. The substance, known as mumia in medical Latin, was believed to have healing properties. Demand was so high that Egyptian tombs were plundered
The word has cognates across European languages, all borrowed from the same Medieval Latin source: French momie, German Mumie, Spanish momia, Italian mummia, and Dutch mummie. These are all loanwords rather than inherited cognates, since the word originates outside the Indo-European family (in Persian, then filtered through Arabic). The spelling with double m in English stabilized by the 16th century.
The first major English-language encounter with actual Egyptian mummies came with Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798-1801 and the subsequent explosion of Egyptomania in Europe. The word mummy became closely associated with ancient Egypt in popular imagination, though the practice of mummification was found in many cultures, including the Chinchorro of Chile (whose mummies predate Egyptian ones by thousands of years) and various Andean and East Asian traditions.
In modern usage, mummy has three primary senses. The first and most common refers to an embalmed or naturally preserved ancient body, particularly from Egypt. The second, used mainly in British English, is the informal word for mother (from a different, unrelated etymology, probably baby-talk reduplication). The third is the pop-culture figure of the animated mummy, a horror archetype that emerged in early 20th-century fiction and film, most famously in Universal Pictures' The Mummy (1932). The word's journey from Persian