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[en-SAYNT, awn-SAYNT] 
1. carrying an unborn child; pregnant: "She was found guilty, but sentencing was delayed, as her counsel said that she was enceinte."
additional noun form: defensive enclosure, area protected by a barrier
Origin:
Approximately 1602; from French, 'enceinte': pregnant; from Medieval Latin, 'incincta': not girded; from Latin, 'cincta': girded. In action:
"Like any other movement embraced by celebrities, pregnancy has acquired, over the past couple of years a sort of hip cachet. It's a fashion, literally, and with enceinte moppets like Hudson and Liv Tyler chewing up press pages, elder flashbulb chasers like Demi Moore (who some maintain is the ur-goddess of the fecund celebrity after her alabaster-skinned nude cover for Vanity Fair in 1991) and Madonna are getting in on the act, by hinting that they too will soon be signing up for another tour of gestational duty. But it's an oddly retro trend. SUNY Buffalo art historian Elizabeth Otto pointed out that the wave of pregnancy porn speaks to a return to less graphic depictions of femininity from the 1950s -- 'the intense interest in home life, home decorating and furnishing ... ideal womanhood as motherhood' -- that filled the pages of Life magazine."
Rebecca Traister. "Pregnancy porn," [Wacky names! Baby 'bumps'! The 'most anticipated baby in the world'! Why do we salivate over spawning celebrities?] Salon.com (July 31, 2004).
"Her joy at being enceinte is troubled by memories of her own oft pregnant mother, who 'always seemed to me exhausted, burdened.' Coming to terms with the violent, irreversible change she is making in her life, Maso realizes that she is keeping a journal 'to have a record of the person I was before she [the baby] ever existed.'"
Joy Press. "A Womb of One's Own," Village Voice (November 22 - 28, 2000).
"In the past, the euphemism was no noun at all: in a family way and expecting were the general terms for a pregnant woman, and she's showing was the delicate phrase to describe a delicate condition that, when it could no longer be hidden, was later called big with child. Informal usage was a bun (turkey, duck) in the oven.
According to Joan Hall at the Dictionary of American Regional English, other descriptions included knocked up, caught the preggies, infanticipating, in bloom, one on the way and eating for two. A note of arch elegance appears in the use of the French word enceinte.
For a time, the protuberance -- the part that sticks out -- was also called the belly or the tummy, but those nouns denoted the stomach or the abdomen more often than the womb or the uterus. In the 1980's, the British adopted a word for the swelling in the front of a woman carrying her future infant: 'Maternity wear rarely looks good belted at the waist,' noted a 1987 style article in The Guardian, 'after the bump has disappeared.'"
William Safire. "On language: 'Bump'," The New York Times (May 14, 2006).
"I positively think that ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or guinea-pig than anything else and really it is not very nice."
Victoria (1819-1901). British monarch, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. [Letter to her daughter Louisa, Princess Frederick William of Prussia.] Letter (June 15, 1859).
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