What people say
Carrying high means a girl; do not raise your arms above your head; do not buy anything before the birth.Body · 1,030 searches a month
Pregnancy superstitions
Carrying high means a girl; do not raise your arms above your head; do not buy anything before the birth.
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Antiquity; bump-shape prediction recorded from the medieval period
That makes it
about 726 years old
Rank by age
15 oldest of 40 dated here
Category
Body
Searched
1,030 a month
Before ultrasound there was no way to know a baby's sex or health, and the gap filled with rules: what not to look at, what not to reach for, what the shape of the bump means.
Why it stuck. Sex prediction is right half the time by chance, and the hits get remembered while the misses are quietly dropped.
What is going on
Bump shape reflects muscle tone, position and the mother's build, not the baby's sex. Ultrasound settles at around 18 weeks.Where it applies. Universal, with the not-buying rule strongest where infant mortality was historically high.
Recorded around the same time
Pregnancy superstitions is the 15th oldest of the 40 dated superstitions here. Of those, 6 are younger than a century and 5 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →