Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

daughter

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Remove ads

English

Etymology

From Middle English doughter, doghter, from Old English dohtor (daughter), from Proto-West Germanic *dohter, from Proto-Germanic *duhtēr, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰugh₂tḗr.

Pronunciation

Noun

daughter (plural daughters or (archaic) daughtren)

  1. One’s female offspring.
    Synonym: girl
    I already have a son, so I would like to have a daughter.
    • 1611, The Holy Bible, [] (King James Version), London: [] Robert Barker, [], →OCLC, Leviticus 26:29, column 1:
      And ye ſhal eate the fleſh of your ſonnes, and the fleſh of your daughters ſhall ye eate.
    • 2021 September 24, Lauren M. Johnson and Christina Zdanowicz, “A gravestone missing for almost 150 years was being used as a marble slab to make fudge”, in CNN:
      They discovered Weller had two daughters and a daughter-in-law in the same cemetery.
    • 2025 April 2, Ben Morse, “‘Whoop, there she is!’: Jason and Kylie Kelce announce birth of fourth daughter”, in CNN:
      Finnley is the fourth daughter of Jason and Kylie Kelce, having already welcomed Wyatt, Elliotte and Bennett to the family.
  2. A female descendant.
    Antonym: son
  3. A daughter language.
  4. (physics) A nuclide left over from radioactive decay.
  5. (syntax, of a parse tree) A descendant.
    • 2013, Daniela Isac, Charles Reiss, “Chapter 7, Some details of sentence structure”, in I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 163:
      We have distinguished two types of situations from the point of view of the placement of the obligatory X constituent within the phrase XP: one in which X is a daughter of XP, and one in which X is not a daughter of XP, but a daughter of one of the constituents of XP (in an adjunct configuration).
    • 2017, Yicheng Wu, “Chapter 2, The dynamics of language processing”, in The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN, page 17:
      Following the conventional pattern, the argument daughter of a node is assigned the index n0 and placed on the left side, and the functor daughter, the index n1, is placed on the right side.
  6. (by extension) A female character of a creator.
  7. (informal, uncommon, sometimes derogatory) A familiar address to a female person from an older or otherwise more authoritative person.

Alternative forms

Antonyms

Hypernyms

Derived terms

Descendants

  • Australian Kriol: doda

Translations

See also

Further reading

Anagrams

Remove ads

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads