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paternity

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pəˈtɜːnɪti//
  • United States//pəˈtɜɹnəti//
  • United States/[-ɾi]/

Fatherhood, the state or quality of being a father.

noun

  1. 1

    Fatherhood, the state or quality of being a father.

  2. 2

    Parental descent from a father.

  3. 3

    Legal acknowledgement of a man's fatherhood of a child.

  4. 4

    figurativeAuthorship.

    The author asserted her right to paternity on the book's copyright page.

Etymology

From Middle French paternité, from Old French, from Latin paternitās (“paternity”), from paternus (“of or pertaining to a father, paternal”) + -itās, from pater (“father”).

Forms

plural
paternities
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).