birth is the emergence of a new individual from the body of its parent, and by extension the beginning or coming into existence of anything.
The word carries several senses. It names the fact of being born, the act of giving birth, and the circumstances one is born into, as in lineage or descent ("a person of noble birth"). Since the early seventeenth century it has also named any origin, so that ideas, movements, and nations can have a birth. As a verb, "to birth" means to give birth to and, more recently, to give rise to.
English took the word around 1200 from Old Norse byrð, which displaced the related Old English gebyrd. Both descend from a Germanic noun built on the root that gives English bear, "to carry; to bear children," with the same process suffix found in death. Birth is broader than delivery, which names the obstetric event, and plainer than nativity, which is formal or religious.
The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof divided the experience of being born into four stages, a model known as 📝The Perinatal Matrix: 📝uterine bliss, 📝confinement, 📝struggle, and 📝emergence into the light. 📝Charles Eisenstein applies those stages collectively in 📝The Ascent of Humanity, reading humanity's present crises as the labor of a 📝Gaian Birthing rather than a collapse.
I collected these four stages from Eisenstein, whose birth metaphor maps the move from the 📝Age of Separation toward the 📝Age of Reunion that anchors my principles.