daughter
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Middle English doghter, doughter, from Old English dohtor (“daughter”), from Proto-West Germanic *dohter, from Proto-Germanic *duhtēr, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰugh₂tḗr.
Pronunciation
[edit]- enPR: dôʹtər
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈdɔːtə/
- (Standard Southern British, Australia, New Zealand) IPA(key): /ˈdoːtə/
Audio (Standard Southern British): (file)
- (General American, without the cot–caught merger) IPA(key): /ˈdɔ.tɚ/, [ˈdɔ.ɾɚ]
- (General American, cot–caught merger) IPA(key): /ˈdɑ.tɚ/, [ˈdɑ.ɾɚ]
Audio (US, cot–caught merger): (file)
- (Scotland) IPA(key): /ˈdɔtəɾ/
- Homophone: dotter (cot–caught merger)
- Hyphenation: daugh‧ter
- Rhymes: -ɔːtə(ɹ)
Noun
[edit]daughter (plural daughters or (archaic) daughtren)
- 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[1], archived from the original on 8 January 2026:
- 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[2], archived from the original on 3 April 2025:
- Finnley is the fourth daughter of Jason and Kylie Kelce, having already welcomed Wyatt, Elliotte and Bennett to the family.
- A female descendant.
- Antonym: son
- 1950 October, C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (fiction):
- Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?
- A daughter language.
- (physics) A nuclide left over from radioactive decay.
- (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.
- (by extension) A female character of a creator.
- (informal, uncommon, sometimes derogatory) A familiar address to a female person from an older or otherwise more authoritative person.
Alternative forms
[edit]Antonyms
[edit]Hypernyms
[edit]Derived terms
[edit]- captain's daughter
- daughterboard
- daughtercard, daughter card
- daughter cell
- daughter company
- daughter cyst
- daughtered
- daughter from California syndrome
- daughterfucker
- daughterhood
- daughtering
- daughter-in-law
- daughter isotope
- daughterkin
- daughter language
- daughterless
- daughterlike
- daughterling
- daughterly
- daughterness
- daughter nuclide
- daughter of a bitch
- daughter of Eve
- daughter of God
- daughter of joy
- daughter of Sappho
- daughter of the desert
- daughter of the manse
- daughter out
- daughter-out-law
- daughter sauce
- daughtership
- devil is beating his wife and marrying his daughter
- drag daughter
- Duke of Exeter's daughter
- dwarf eldest daughter
- farmer's daughter
- father-daughter day
- give one's daughter away
- goddaughter, god-daughter
- granddaughter
- great-granddaughter
- gunner's daughter
- King's Daughters
- kiss the gunner's daughter
- marry the gunner's daughter
- merdaughter
- native daughter
- only daughter
- scavenger's daughter
- Skeffington's daughter
- Skevington's daughter
- stepdaughter
Descendants
[edit]- Australian Kriol: doda
Translations
[edit]female offspring
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See also
[edit]Further reading
[edit]
Anagrams
[edit]Categories:
- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms inherited from Old English
- English terms derived from Old English
- English terms inherited from Proto-West Germanic
- English terms derived from Proto-West Germanic
- English terms inherited from Proto-Germanic
- English terms derived from Proto-Germanic
- English terms inherited from Proto-Indo-European
- English terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English terms with homophones
- Rhymes:English/ɔːtə(ɹ)
- Rhymes:English/ɔːtə(ɹ)/2 syllables
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English nouns with irregular plurals
- English terms with usage examples
- English terms with quotations
- en:Physics
- en:Syntax
- English informal terms
- English terms with uncommon senses
- English derogatory terms
- English endearing terms
- English terms of address
- en:Female family members