Skip to content
Allin

parent

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɛəɹənt//
  • United Kingdom//ˈpɛːɹənt//
  • United States//ˈpɛəɹənt//

A person who raises a child (which they have made, adopted, fostered, taken as their own, etc.).

noun

  1. 1

    A person who raises a child (which they have made, adopted, fostered, taken as their own, etc.).

    After both her parents were killed in a forest fire, Sonia was adopted by her aunt and uncle.

    my trust / Like a good parent, did beget of him / A falsehood in it's contrarie, as great / As my trust was, which had indeede no limit, / A confidence sans bound.

    And they asked them, saying, Is this your son, who ye say was born blind? how then doth he now see? His parents answered them and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind […]

    The NHS is naturally pro-immunisation, reassuring parents that their babies can easily cope with these jabs.

  2. 2

    A person who has had a baby; this person in relation to their child or children.

  3. 3

    A surrogate parent.

  4. 4

    A third person who has provided DNA samples in an IVF procedure in order to alter faulty genetic material.

  5. 5

    obsoleteA relative.

  6. 6

    The source or origin of something.

    Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.

    Indolence and unalimentary food are the parents of this disease; but to neither are Indians accustomed.

  7. 7

    An organism from which a plant or animal is immediately biologically descended.

  8. 8

    Sponsor, supporter, owner, protector.

    The dinghy was trailing astern at the end of its painter, and Merrion looked at it as he passed. He saw that it was a battered-looking affair of the prahm type, with a blunt snout, and like the parent ship, had recently been painted a vivid green.

  9. 9

    Sponsor, supporter, owner, protector. A parent company.

  10. 10

    The object from which a child or derived object is descended; a node superior to another node.

  11. 11

    The nuclide that decays into a daughter nuclide.

Etymology

From Middle English parent, borrowed from Anglo-Norman parent, Middle French parent, from Latin parentem, accusative of parēns (“parent”), present participle of pariō (“to breed, bring forth”).

verb

  1. 1

    To act as parent, to raise or rear.

    However, even with money and caregivers, the child is left without a parent and most likely without a plan for their emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being. A time will come when you will no longer be able to parent your child, period.

  2. 2

    To provide a parent object for one or more other objects, which become the children.

Forms

plural
parents
past tense
parented
past participle
parented
present participle
parenting
third person singular
parents
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).