birth certificate

noun

: a copy of an official record of a person's date and place of birth and parentage

Examples of birth certificate in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

In his hands was the Colorado birth certificate his lawyers had spent months trying to make the government believe. — María Luisa Paúl, USA Today, 6 Sep. 2026

Voting rights advocates argue that requirements to present birth certificates or passports in order to register to vote is intended to make voting more difficult, to dissuade some people from voting at all. — Todd Spangler, Freep.com, 4 Sep. 2026

Baha Sibai, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at in the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, believes the rate could be even higher because many birth certificates have incomplete data. — Megha Satyanarayana, Scientific American, 2 Sep. 2026

Still, the authors specifically caution that gestational hypertension is probably underreported because health conditions are often underreported on birth certificates. — Faye Chiu, CNN Money, 21 Aug. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1821, in the meaning defined above

Medical Definition

birth certificate

noun

birth cer·​tif·​i·​cate -(ˌ)sər-ˈtif-i-kət 

: a copy of an official record of a person's date and place of birth and parentage