different between stillborn vs stillbirth

English

Alternative forms

• still-born

Etymology

First attested 1597, from English still +? born

Adjective

stillborn (not comparable)

1. Dead at birth.

   Synonym: deadborn

   • 1768, Horace Walpole, "Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III,"

     Queen Anne, before Elizabeth, bore a still-born son.

   • 1978, Holy Bible (New International Version), Job 3:16,

     Or why was I not hidden in the ground like a stillborn child, like an infant who never saw the light of day?

2. (figuratively, by extension) Ignored, without influence, or unsuccessful from the outset; abortive.

   Synonym: unfruitful

   • 1859, Charles Reade, Love Me Little, Love Me Long, ch. 11,

     This, gentlemen, is a list of the joint-stock companies created last year. . . . Of these some were stillborn, but the majority hold the market.

   • 1915, William MacLeod Raine, The Highgrader, ch. 18,

     His lips framed themselves to whistle the first bars of a popular song, but the sound died stillborn.

Translations

Noun

stillborn (plural stillborns)

1. A baby that is born dead.

English

Etymology

still +? birth

Alternative forms

• still-birth

Noun

stillbirth (plural stillbirths)

1. The birth of a dead fetus; the delivery of an infant which is dead at birth.
2. (modern medicine) The birth of a dead fetus after 20 weeks of gestation.
   • 1988, Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 5890

     Each year, approximately a million pregnancies in the United States end in miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of the newborn child.

Usage notes

Many uses of the term stillbirth (and almost all modern medical uses) differentiate it from miscarriage, for either of two reasons. (1) In the older and broader senses of the terms, the concepts are distinct but are often instantiated together, because many stillbirths (where a stillbirth is any event where a baby is born dead) result from miscarriage (where a miscarriage is any instance of carrying [gestation] being interrupted prematurely). However, occasionally fetuses die during or right before full-term birth (for various reasons), in which case a stillbirth with no miscarriage has occurred, in these older and broader senses of the terms. (2) More importantly, regarding current usage, the modern medical senses of the terms are generally defined mutually exclusively with a dividing line at the gestational age of 20 weeks (which represents periviability), reserving the term miscarriage for earlier events and the term stillbirth for later events.

Related terms

• stillborn

Translations

See also

• death
• livebirth
• maternal death
• jellyfish baby