offspring
noun
Simple meaning
An animal or plant's progeny or young.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
awfspringSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈɔfspɹɪŋ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
An animal or plant's progeny or young.
A person's daughter or son; a person's child.
Any of a person's descendants, including of further generations.
The immediate descendants of a person
“She was the mother of many offspring.”
Any immature animal
figuratively
Anything produced; the result of an entity's efforts.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: An animal or plant's progeny or young.
Used this way, offspring is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use offspring
- “She was the mother of many offspring.”noun
- “Industrialism prepared the way for acceptance of the French Revolution's various socialistic offspring.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A child who is female.
A child who is male.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: animal or plant's progeny or young
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.