# daughter

Pronunciation: US say "DAW-tur" /ˈdɔ.tɚ/; say "DAW-tuh" UK /ˈdɔːtə(ɹ)/, AUS /ˈdoːtɐ/

## Noun

1. One's female offspring.
   - Simple: A person's female child.
   - _The couple announced the birth of their fourth daughter on Wednesday._
   - _He left the farm to his eldest daughter rather than to either son._
2. A female descendant of a person or family, at any remove.
   - Simple: A girl or woman who comes from a certain person's family line.
   - _Every daughter of the house had been married from that chapel._
   - _Through her grandmother's line, she was a daughter of the clan that had held the valley for centuries._
3. A woman regarded as part of a place, people, or group, or as molded by it, most often her hometown or native country.
   - Simple: A woman seen as coming from a place or group, often the town or country where she was born.
   - _The mayor unveiled a statue honoring the town's most celebrated daughter._
   - _A daughter of the labor movement, she spent forty years organizing textile workers._
4. A female character regarded as the offspring of her creator.
   - Simple: A female character that a writer or artist has created.
   - _Of all Dickens's daughters, Little Nell was the one readers mourned._
   - _The novelist spoke of her heroine as a daughter she had raised over ten drafts._
5. A language that developed from an earlier parent language; a daughter language.
   - Simple: A language that grew out of an older language.
   - _Romanian is the easternmost daughter of Latin._
   - _Linguists compare the daughters to reconstruct what the parent must have sounded like._
6. In physics, a nuclide produced by the radioactive decay of another.
   - Simple: In physics, the new atom that is left after a radioactive atom breaks down.
   - _The daughter may itself be unstable and decay again along the chain._
   - _Dating a sample means comparing the surviving parent with its accumulated daughter._

## Noun

7. A familiar form of address to a girl or woman from an older or more authoritative person. *(rare)*
   - Simple: A way an older person may speak to a girl or woman, which can sound kind or talk down to her.
   - _"Rest now, daughter," the abbess told the novice._
   - _"Sit down, daughter, and listen to your elders," the village headman said, and the young woman pressed her lips together._

## Other meanings

- (noun) In syntax, a node of a parse tree that is immediately dominated by another.

## Origin

The word traces back to Proto-Indo-European *dʰugh₂tḗr and came down through Proto-Germanic and Proto-West Germanic into Old English as dohtor ("daughter"), then into Middle English as doghter.

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