The Devil's Encyclopedia: M
Milf
Milf is an acronym for Mom I'd Love to Fuck, popularized by the movie American Pie with relation to the character usually known simply as "Stifler's mom." The term has become one of the more successful movie terms to spread, beating out the less popular Maternal-Aged Woman with Whom I'd Rather Like to Make Whoopie from The Newlywed Game Movie. The success of the term owes itself not to the actress playing the character (Jennifer Coolidge, the Mom I'd Love to Have Required to Be Wearing a Paper Bag Over Her Head If within a Fifty-Foot Radius of Me) but rather the long-awaited acceptance of an attraction to "the older woman," and to a lesser extent, single mothers.
Despite the implied emphasis on age high enough to be one's mother as part of the MILF definition, the term tends to be applied rather often to women who are not much older or even younger than the speaker. This owes itself largely to the availability of more female sex symbols in their 30s or even 40s. It is somewhat of a bastardization to use on a woman with a child of any age, however, as the high proportion of women that have children while in their 20s or teens makes that usage somewhat meaningless.
The original context of a friend's mother is shown prominently in Fountains of Wayne hit "Stacy's Mom," in which the singer's friend Stacy can be inferred to be interested in him, but he only has eyes for her mother. The song was released a few years after the movie American Pie spread the term, and featured former supermodel Rachel Hunter as the mother in the music video. It has also spun off the somewhat perverse term of GILF, or Grandma I'd Love to Fuck. In a possibly related event, it has also spun off a large streak of people running to the toilet to vomit.