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
Matt Bradley, NBC news, 21 Oct. 2025
Mike Vrabel has engendered as much buy-in as any Patriots head coach since prime Bill Belichick.
—Andrew Callahan, Boston Herald, 19 Oct. 2025
Pratt knows the Palisades doesn’t easily engender sympathy.
—Gary Baum, HollywoodReporter, 16 Oct. 2025
While the resolutions of those cases followed ITIA and WADA regulations and precedent, their speed and brevity still engendered resentment among tennis players over the perception of a two-tier system for higher- and lower-ranked players.
—Charlie Eccleshare, New York Times, 9 Oct. 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 4 Nov. 2025.
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engender
verb
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