Meaning of descendant in English

descendant

/dɪˈsen.dənt/ us

/dɪˈsen.dənt/

a person who is related to you and who lives after you, such as your child or grandchild:

He has no descendants.

They claim to be descendants of a French duke.

We owe it to our descendants (= people younger than us who will live after we have died) to leave them a clean world to live in.

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ancestor

an animal that lives after and is related to another animal that lived in the past:

Lemurs are descendants of the earliest primates.

something that is similar to and influenced by something that existed before it:

Freeride skiing is a hybrid, trick-oriented descendant of skateboarding and snowboarding.

The file-sharing service and its descendants allowed users to download music for free.

More examplesFewer examples

Most of these people are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Surely our descendants will wonder why we didn't notice, why we did nothing about greenhouse gases.
These wild horses are the living descendants of untold generations of Ozarks history.
He hopes descendants of these monkeys will spread beyond the reserve to repopulate nearby mountains.
What makes these mutations particularly dangerous is that they are passed down from a cell to all its descendants.
This celebrated Coen brothers debut is a worthy descendant of classic 1940s film noir.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Family: ancestors & descendants

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You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Plants & animals - general words

Replacing and exchanging

Change and changes

(Definition of descendant from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

descendant | American Dictionary

descendant

noun [ C ]

/dɪˈsen·dənt/

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a person related to someone from an earlier generation (= all the people of about the same age within a particular family):

The Pennsylvania Dutch are descendants of early German immigrants.

(Definition of descendant from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of descendant

descendant

Therefore, growth rates may increase over time simply because the initial and descendant cells are recovering from treatment rather than evolving.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Later they absorbed the surviving nomadic descendants of the authentic autochtons.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The binding will only be visible in the current space and its descendants.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Ancestors, by contrast, were continuous and consubstantial with their descendants, which guaranteed their human approachability.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

And these masks, in turn, are most likely descendants of medieval devil clowns.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

For women and religious titleholders, our models suggest a potent and statistically meaningful connection between the father's religious title and his descendant's wealth.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Nor does one have any control over what an offspring may do to a third or subseqent generations of descendants.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

As a person's descendants branch out over successive generations, each generation gains only a portion of the earlier generation's claim.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Within each continent of origin there are no differences in standardized mean birth weights of descendants of the different component countries, with only three exceptions.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

For one group of their descendants, the magic strainer through which longsuffering language is to be poured is the supposedly sociopolitical criterion of 'sexism'.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Niche-constructing organisms may also substantially modify the environment of their offspring, and even more distant descendants.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This means, by recursion, that even if we don't care directly for the well-being of our distant descendants, we do care for them indirectly.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The vast majority of adult descendants were married, widowed or divorced.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

In other cases descendants of siblings could be given priority over the offspring of the deceased.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

It extended to all lineal descendants of the degraded individual born subsequent to the act resulting in degradation.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations with descendant

descendant

These are words often used in combination with descendant.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

direct descendant

We are left in no doubt that we are dealing with a direct descendant of the animal whose special gift was the multiplication of words.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

lineal descendant

I suggest that there is an alternative, and that is its lineal descendant, the basic income guarantee scheme.

From the

Hansard archive

Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0

living descendants

The latter claim a special distinction as living descendants of the original troubadours; the former views himself as more remotely related to medieval music.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

See all collocations with descendant

What is the pronunciation of descendant?

Translations of descendant

in Chinese (Traditional)

子孫，後代…

Meaning of descendant in English

descendant | American Dictionary

Examples of descendant

Collocations with descendant

descendant

Translations of descendant

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