Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To father; sire.
- v. To cause to exist or occur; produce: Violence begets more violence.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To procreate; generate: chiefly used of the father alone, but sometimes of both parents.
- To produce as an effect; cause to exist; generate; occasion: as, luxury begets vice; “love is begot by fancy,”
- Synonyms To breed, engender.
Wiktionary
- v. To cause; to produce.
- v. To procreate; to father (rarely: to mother); to get with child.
- v. To happen to; befall.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To procreate, as a father or sire; to generate; -- commonly said of the father.
- v. obsolete To get (with child.)
- v. To produce as an effect; to cause to exist.
WordNet 3.0
- v. make children
Etymologies
- From Middle English begeten, biȝeten, from Old English beġietan ("to get, find, acquire, attain, receive, take, seize, happen, beget"), from Proto-Germanic *bigetanan (“to find, seize”), equivalent to be- + get. Cognate with Old Saxon bigitan ("to find, seize"), Old High German bigezan ("to gain, achieve, win, procure") (German begatten ("to mate, copulate, beget")). (Wiktionary)
- Middle English biyeten, bigeten, from Old English begetan; see ghend- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“A natural citizen must beget from the womb of a female citizen.”
And Bring on the Mexicans, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“From this false idea of monopoly has come the Greek name of usury, tokos, as much as to say the child or the increase of capital, which caused Aristotle to perpetrate this witticism: coins beget no children.”
System of Economical Contradictions: or, the Philosophy of Misery
“Somehow bad calls beget bad calls, and even though this group was selected for their experience after a particularly poor playoff thus far by the men in blue, they couldn't work more than one solid game in a row without screwing up royally in Game 2.”
“Since the first half of the verse already allows itself a different mode of speech than the preceding (yaladh -- "beget"), this half-verse is promptly stamped as interpolation, the assumption being that no author could have had the least of flexibility of style.”
“Justin and Tatian used the expression "beget" [Greek: gennan] for the creation of the world, but in connections which do not admit of any importance being attached to this use.”
“I have used the word "beget," of what, I am told, is asexual generation, whereas the word should be confined to sexual generation only.”
“The word "beget" applied only to men in Scripture is additional enforcement of the idea that the creative act belongs to him alone.”
“I acknowledge that the Greek word for 'beget' is genderless whereas in Arabic there is both a male form”
“The Christian Bible Doesn't throwing out the word "begotten" from John 3: 16 confirm what the HQ has been saying for about 1400 years, that Jesus was not begotten by God, that God DOES NOT begett? he may not 'beget', but he just couldn't resist that human poontang, could he?”
“Baird, in 1972, the Court invalidated a state law preventing unmarried individuals access to contraceptives and declared, “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.””
Simon & Schuster: The Conservative Assault on the Constitution
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘beget’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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RELI - Genesis
Protagonists and relevant words in the Book of Creation (Source: King James Bible)
Laban, circumcise, beget, Esau, Rebekah, speckle, Sodom, Pharaoh, Canaanite, Canaan, Jacob, Lot and 1286 more...
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EN - eloquence in public speaking
Key words from "The Training of a Public Speaker" by Grenville Kleiser (New York and London, 1920)
beget, imago, approbation, orator, peroration, Cicero, eloquence, elocution, rhetoric, premeditate, plead, Isocrates and 264 more...
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Imbible Code ✞
Christian word branding; common English word-associatives connected to Bible terminology or scripture.
I also have a general Bible-word list.god, father, son, trinity, sacrament, knowledge, serpent, flood, evil, good, spirit, revelation and 118 more...
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Vocabulary
shibboleth, verboten, jejune, ostensible, multifarious, quintessence, purportedly, tangential, vacillate, quagmire, wanton, onerous and 74 more...
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Get, Got, Gotten
get a move on, misbegotten, got the gimmes, don't get me started, man's gotta eat, get a life, get lost, got religion, cat got your tongue?, get together, get the lead out, got milk? and 72 more...
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Moby Dick
Words of interest from the book Moby Dick.
arrant, obstreperously, coffer-dam, farrago, rejoinder, counterpane, hamper, commend, grego, dreadnought, psalmody, expostulation and 85 more...
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scholarly writing words
decrement, replete, impel, iterative, subsume, tacit, vex, denote, impart, ascertain, coalesce, extant and 49 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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MiaLuthien's list ♥
gambit, prehensile, coquetry, impunity, genuflect, ensconce, clavicle, delude, beget, castigate, life caching, convoluted and 478 more...
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generationnext's Words
petulant, vehement, pensive, lascivious, vacillate, histrionic, satiated, svelte, lithe, zeitgeist, viscous, sommelier and 526 more...
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summerwing's Words
proctosigmoidoscopy, horrendous, cichlid, implode, nostalgic, firmament, elucidate, quintet, rhombus, mack, pithy, rambunctious and 304 more...
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Belistful
Tubey or not tubey.
belittle, bedazzle, besiege, besmirch, bespeckle, beget, bemoan, befuddle, befriend, become, besot, becloud and 596 more...
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strangelyrouge's Words
glockenspiel, gewgaw, jetsam, flotsam, gripe, grab, wench, whilst, betwixt, hither, thither, yonder and 1034 more...
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kat's words
ecumenical, cacophony, clatter, marimba, bamboo, saffron, slice, mercurial, pomegranate, cranky, slipshod, scritch and 511 more...
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Quaintnesses
For those who wish no words were ever forgotten
opprobrium, tedium, encomium, odium, ire, enmity, beguile, wile, brazen, popinjay, squit, hoity-toity and 1161 more...
Tweets
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