engender
verb
Did you know?
A good paragraph about engender will engender understanding in the reader. Like its synonym generate, engender comes from the Latin verb generare, meaning “to generate” or “to beget,” and when the word was first used in the 14th century, engender meant “propagate” or “procreate.” That literal meaning having to do with creating offspring (which generate shared when it was adopted in the early 16th century) was soon joined by the “to cause to exist or develop; to produce” meaning most familiar to us today. Generare didn’t just engender generate and engender; regenerate, degenerate, and generation have the same Latin root. As you might suspect, the list of engender relatives does not end there. Generare comes from the Latin noun genus, meaning “origin” or “kind.” From this source we took our own word genus, plus gender, general, and generic, among other words.
Synonyms
Examples of engender in a Sentence
Brady Dale, Axios, 29 Oct. 2024
Predictably, the memory of the Holocaust engenders a deep sensitivity to any discussions about it.
—Türkay Salim Nefes, JSTOR Daily, 16 Oct. 2024
Scotti sketches all her characters with a combination of emotional detail, which naturally engenders empathy, and a level of cool remove that keeps us from passionately throwing our allegiances around.
—Sara Holdren, Vulture, 19 Sep. 2024
At the end of the day, the purpose of assigning a problem set is not to have the student solve the problems per se but to use the work that students do while solving the problems to engender a certain amount of learning in the student.
—Ray Ravaglia, Forbes, 11 Sep. 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near engender
Cite this Entry
“Engender.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engender. Accessed 28 Nov. 2024.
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engender
verb
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