Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The organism or organisms resulting from sexual or asexual reproduction.
- noun A child or children of a parent or parents.
- noun The result or product of something.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Origin; descent; family.
- noun Propagation; generation.
- noun Progeny; descendants, however remote from the stock; issue: a collective term, applied to several or all descendants (sometimes, exceptionally, to collateral branches), or to one child if the sole descendant.
- noun Synonyms Offspring, Issue, Progeny, Posterity, Descendants. Offspring and progeny apply to the young of man or beast; the rest usually only to the human race. Offspring and issue usually imply more than one, but may refer to one only; progeny and posterity refer to more than one, and generally to many: offspring and issue refer generally to the first generation, the rest to as many generations as there may be in the case, posterity and descendants necessarily covering more than one. Issue is almost always a legal or genealogical term, referring to a child or children of one who has died. Posterity implies an indefinite future of descent.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete The act of production; generation.
- noun That which is produced; a child or children; a descendant or descendants, however remote from the stock.
- noun obsolete Origin; lineage; family.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A person's
daughter (s) and/orson (s); a person'schildren . - noun All a person's
descendants , including further generations. - noun An animal or plant's
progeny , an animal or plant'syoung . - noun figuratively Another
produce , result of an entity's efforts. - noun computing A
process launched by another process.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the immediate descendants of a person
- noun something that comes into existence as a result
- noun any immature animal
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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* In primitive conditions, given the unsually demanding task (compared to other mammals) of raising human babies, paternal investment in offspring is required.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Interracial Marriage Rates Going Up 2010
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As the result, the level of intelligence in offspring is (more or less) normally — i.e., "bell curve" — distributed among the offspring, with the average being the AVERAGE OF THE average of the parents 'intelligence and the racial average.
What a Bunch of Apes! « L.E. Modesitt, Jr. – The Official Website 2009
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When you help to give birth, the health and welfare of the offspring is always of great interest.
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Helms, Fewellf & Rissing, Sex ratio determination by queens and workers in the ant Pheidole desertorum, Animal Behaviour 2000. angryoldfatman: Having sterile offspring is not an evolutionary advantage.
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Having sterile offspring is not an evolutionary advantage.
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The non-fertility of those offspring is another general rule that has exceptions.
What a Bunch of Apes! « L.E. Modesitt, Jr. – The Official Website 2009
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The first tentative encounter between Paul and his offspring is handled with considerable wit and delicacy.
The Kids Are All Right – review Philip French 2010
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So having sterile offspring is not an evolutionary disadvantage, unless it results in extinction, then it is. angryoldfatman: For social insects to have evolved, at some point having sterile offspring had to be advantageous for the organism in question.
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With our congenital defect, even the thought of the act that might produce offspring is most horrid to us.
Clubhouse update marshallpayne1 2009
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Maybe all this will change for the better as a new generation is born with an online presence, with an increasing number of parents securing Twitter addresses for their offspring from the start.
Roughly 3 out of 4 Tweets ignored Bob Brown 2010
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