In Latin knows that alma mater, a
fancy term for the school you attended, comes from a phrase that means
"fostering mother."
The word matriculate is distantly
related to the Latin mater, but its maternal associations were lost long
ago—even in terms of Latin history. It is more closely related to Late Latin matricula,
which means "public roll or register."
Matricula has more to do with
being enrolled than being mothered, but it is the diminutive form of the Latin
matrix , which in Late Latin was used in the sense of "list" or
"register" and earlier referred to female animals kept for the
purposes of breeding.
