Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective About to bring forth young; being in labor.
  • adjective Of or relating to giving birth.
  • adjective About to produce or come forth with something, such as an idea or a discovery.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Bringing forth or about to bring forth young: sometimes, as in the quotation, extended to a more general use.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Bringing forth, or about to bring forth, young; fruitful.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective In labour; having recently given birth.
  • adjective by extension About to create a new product, or float a new idea.
  • adjective Of, related to, or caused by childbirth
  • adjective of a substance Facilitating labour.
  • noun One who is in labour or has recently given birth.
  • noun A substance that facilitates labour.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective of or relating to or giving birth
  • adjective giving birth

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin parturiēns, parturient-, present participle of parturīre, to be in labor, from partus, past participle of parere, to give birth; see perə- in Indo-European roots.]

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Examples

  • No very definite custom or practice seems to be followed; the most common is, that several matrons preside as midwives in the lodge of the parturient, which is, especially in delayed cases, filled to suffocation with indifferently solicitous (?) relations and friends.

    Labor Among Primitive Peoples 1884

  • The midwife, situated in front of the parturient, would massage the uterus, while the tenedora supported her from the back.

    Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008

  • Only in cases of difficult deliveries, which most often resulted in the death of the mother, child, or both, was the colonial midwife bound by any sort of legislation; in such a case it obliged her to seek a surgeon's aid for the suffering parturient.

    Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008

  • In 1912, similar goals were adopted by another group, the Israelite Female Beneficence Society (Sociedad Israelita Femenina de Beneficencia), which lent small amounts of money to the poor and helped parturient women.

    Argentina: Philanthropic Organizations. 2009

  • Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

    Archive 2007-07-01 Ayala Sender 2007

  • Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

    Tech Guru Vince Stehle Launches LoremIpsum.com 2007

  • Even more than the treatment of pregnant women, the field of obstetrics was perceived as an exclusively female medical trade, practiced by women trained generally in oral traditions of midwifery. 90 The midwife was responsible for preparing the parturient woman and alleviating the pain and discomfort of the birthing process.

    A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

  • Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

    Lorem ipsum Ayala Sender 2007

  • The notion of improving the condition of the poor had not yet dawned on the mind of the governing class; to make the artizan and the operative self-supporting and self-respectful was a movement not merely unformulated, but a conception beyond the parturient faculty of a member of the Jacquerie.

    Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine 2006

  • They gave this parturient goddess the nondescript title of "resin garden mummy 5 piece set," but her moon belly reveals the truth.

    Halloween Fertility Decor | Thingamababy 2005

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  • Parturient silences and clean landscapes offer a promise of fresh beginnings, and if certain hopes lie dormant it's only because they're gathering strength.

    Peter M. Leschak, Seeing the Raven

    December 14, 2011