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.
Examples of engender in a Sentence
Waiyee Loh, JSTOR Daily, 2 July 2025
Argentina’s Boca have a seductive madness about them, engendered by their colossal support.
—Phil Hay, New York Times, 17 June 2025
In any event, migration tends to engender further movement.
—Robert O. Keohane, Foreign Affairs, 2 June 2025
Both have engendered a loyalty in their audiences which verges on the religious.
—Eric Lach, New Yorker, 8 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for engender
Cite this Entry
“Engender.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engender. Accessed 18 Jul. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
engender
verb
Share