foster

Formsfosters, fostering, fostered

Pluralfosters

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To promote the development of something, helping it grow and thrive.

   Good teachers foster a love of reading in their students.

   The grant program fostered new research across the department.

   Similarencourage, promote, cultivate, nurture, stimulate

   Oppositediscourage, stifle, suppress, inhibit

   Note

   Figurative growth, and what grows need not be welcome. A company fosters an appreciation for the arts, but in Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna (1905) Sish fosters weeds, and Robbie Collin's 2016 review of Grimsby speaks of the social division a show fosters. The verb means encouragement, not approval, so the object sets the tone. Tennyson in 1850 writes foster'd up, with care.

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To rear young, or to give an unrelated child the kind of care a parent would.

   The couple chose to foster a teenager whose parents could no longer cope.

   For decades they fostered children who needed a safe home.

   Similarraise, rear, nurture, parent

   Note

   Rearing in the widest sense, and not only by humans. In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, ravens are said to foster forlorn children while their own birds starve in the nest. The verb always takes an object: you foster a child, never simply foster. In modern use it most often means taking in a child who is not your own.

3. 3
   adjective

   Providing parental care to a child who is not one's own relative.

   The foster family welcomed three new arrivals this spring.

   She trained for months before taking on her first foster placement.

   Oppositebiological

   Note

   Nourishment lies behind every sense of the word. Old English fōstor meant "food, sustenance", so a foster parent was first of all the one who fed a child. As an adjective it sits before its noun, as in foster parents or a foster home, and it does not compare: no parent is more foster than another.

4. 4
   adjective

   Receiving parental care from someone who is not a birth relative.

   The foster child kept a photo of her first guardians on the shelf.

   As a foster youth, he learned to adapt to several households.

   Oppositebiological

5. 5
   adjective

   Related to others through fostering rather than by blood.

   His foster sister inherited none of the estate, yet remained at his side.

   The two grew up as foster siblings under the same roof.

   Oppositebiological

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To nurse something along or cherish it.

   He fostered a lifelong love of the sea.

   Small communities foster traditions that bind one generation to the next.

   Similarcherish, nurture, nurse, cultivate, harbor

   Oppositeneglect, abandon

7. 7
   nouncolloquialcountable

   Someone who acts as a parent to a child not biologically their own.

   The agency matched each child with an experienced foster within days.

   As a longtime foster, she had welcomed more than forty kids over the years.

   Similarcarer, caregiver, guardian

8. 8
   noununcountable

   Guardianship or care provided for another, especially a child or animal placed with a foster family.

   With the shelter full, every new litter of puppies goes straight into foster with a volunteer family.

   As was usual for a family of their rank, the infant was put out to foster with a farmer's wife in the next valley.

   Similarcare, guardianship

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