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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. v. To father; sire.
  2. v. To cause to exist or occur; produce: Violence begets more violence.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. To procreate; generate: chiefly used of the father alone, but sometimes of both parents.
  2. To produce as an effect; cause to exist; generate; occasion: as, luxury begets vice; “love is begot by fancy,”
  3. Synonyms To breed, engender.

Wiktionary

  1. v. To cause; to produce.
  2. v. To procreate; to father (rarely: to mother); to get with child.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. v. To procreate, as a father or sire; to generate; -- commonly said of the father.
  2. v. To get (with child.)
  3. v. To produce as an effect; to cause to exist.

WordNet 3.0

  1. v. make children

Etymologies

  1. Middle English biyeten, bigeten, from Old English begetan; see ghend- in Indo-European roots.

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.”

    Sportsnet.ca - Sports News

  • “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.”

    Exposition of Genesis: Volume 1

  • “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.”

    History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7)

  • “I have used the word "beget," of what, I am told, is asexual generation, whereas the word should be confined to sexual generation only.”

    Life and Habit

  • “The word "beget" applied only to men in Scripture is additional enforcement of the idea that the creative act belongs to him alone.”

    The Woman's Bible

  • “I acknowledge that the Greek word for 'beget' is genderless whereas in Arabic there is both a male form”

    Barbados Underground

  • “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?”

    Answerbag: Latest Questions in Question Categories

  • “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

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‘beget’ has been looked up 2757 times, loved by 5 people, added to 30 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 8.