offspring
Pluraloffspring, offsprings
- 1A person's son or daughter; their child.
His offspring inherited both his temperament and his stubbornness.
She regarded the young man as her only offspring.
Note
The core sense goes back to an Old English compound of off- and spring, so the child is what springs off a parent. Icelandic afspringur is built the same way. The plural is normally unchanged: one offspring, three offspring. The singular form is also often used collectively for all of someone's children. Offsprings also exists, though the unchanged form is the safer choice.
- 2
- 3Anyone descended from a particular person, whether a child, a grandchild, or someone many generations later.
He claimed to be an offspring of an ancient noble house.
The dynasty's offspring scattered throughout Europe over five generations.
Similardescendant, scion
- 4Something brought into being; the product of a person's or group's efforts.
Like a wide river that forms from many small streams flowing together.
The festival was the offspring of a few friends' shared enthusiasm.
Modern jazz is in many ways the offspring of the blues.
Similarproduct, brainchild, creation
- 5A process started or launched by another process.
The parent process spawned an offspring to manage the network connection.
If the main process crashes, its offspring may keep running in the background.
Similarchild
Oppositeparent
Note
Computing takes over the family metaphor completely. The process that creates another is its parent, and the new one is its offspring. It comes into being through a spawning or forking operation and typically inherits part of the parent's execution context and resources. Here the word is purely technical and carries none of the warmth of the figurative "creation" sense.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English ofspring, from Old English ofspring meaning 'offspring, descendants, posterity', formed from off- plus spring, and comparable to Icelandic afspringur ('offspring').