parent

noun

Parent — the living source from which a new life is drawn

Definition

An organism (plant or animal) from which younger ones are obtained

In depth

A parent, in the broad biological sense, is the organism from which offspring arise, whether through birth, hatching, budding, or any other process by which life produces further life. Beyond biology, the word has come to carry enormous emotional and social weight, naming not just origin but ongoing responsibility, care, and relationship.

Origin

The word comes from Latin parens, the present participle of parere, to bring forth or give birth, a root shared with 'parturition' and 'postpartum.' Its entry into English in the late medieval period gradually broadened from a narrowly biological term into the rich social and emotional category it occupies today.

Usage examples

"In botany, the parent plant is sometimes left to wither once it has produced its seeds, its work complete."

"She had spent thirty years as a parent before realizing she had never once asked her own mother the same questions her children now asked her."

"The scientists studied which traits passed reliably from parent to offspring across a dozen generations of fruit flies."

How to use it

Parent functions easily across registers, from cold biological description to deeply intimate memoir, and writers often deliberately move between these registers within a single passage — describing a parent first as a biological fact, then as an emotional one — to powerful effect.