# child

Pronunciation: say "CHYLD" /t͡ʃaɪld/

## Noun

1. A young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of adulthood; a boy or girl.
   - Simple: A young boy or girl who is not yet an adult.
   - _A child cannot legally sign a contract in most countries._
   - _Schools usually group children by age rather than ability._
2. A son or daughter, by birth or adoption, of any age.
   - Simple: A son or daughter of a parent, even when fully grown.
   - _Their adult child still phones them every Sunday._
   - _She has two children, both already in their fifties._
3. A grown person who behaves without maturity or responsibility, or who is naive in some area.
   - Simple: A grown-up who acts in a silly or careless way, or who knows very little about something.
   - _Her husband is a child when he's sick, moaning from the couch all day._
   - _The founders were brilliant engineers but children in matters of finance._
4. A person or thing regarded as the product of a particular place, time, culture, or influence, as in 'a child of the sixties'.
   - Simple: A person or thing shaped or produced by a certain place, time, or idea.
   - _He remained a child of the desert all his life._
   - _Those poets were children of the Enlightenment._
5. In computing, a node, process, or object that sits directly beneath or is derived from another, called its parent.
   - Simple: In computing, an item that comes directly under another item, called its parent.
   - _The operating system created a child to run the nightly backup._
   - _Parent objects pass their settings down to their children._

## Noun

6. A girl; a female offspring as distinct from a male one. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: A girl rather than a boy.

## Verb

7. To bear offspring; to bring a child into being. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: To give birth to a child, or to father one.

## Origin

**Meanings 1–6** — This word comes from Middle English "child" and Old English "ċild," going back to Proto-Germanic "*kelþaz" meaning "womb" or "fetus," and, on one account, to a Proto-Indo-European root for "womb," perhaps linked to a root meaning "to ball up, amass." It is related to Gothic "kilþei" (womb) and the Danish and Swedish words for "brood" or "litter."
**Meaning 7** — This comes from Middle English "childen," formed from the noun "child."

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/child (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).