Word.ws English Dictionary

eldfather

eldfather noun: one's grandfather or forefather.

Noun

eldfather (plural eldfathers)

  1. (archaic, dialectal) One's grandfather or forefather.
    • Elof sat with his eyes closed, still in the grip of the thought that he had just heard his eldfathers, all the way back to Adam, chanting at the table.1975, Frederick Feikema Manfred, The chokecherry tree, page 19
    • For some reason "rune" continued to be the most attractive of the two, though, truth to tell, there had been no more than the usual mention of the word either in my general reading or in the Frisian (the language of my eldfathers) […]1994, Frederick Feikema Manfred, Duke's Mixture, page 12
  2. (obsolete) One's father-in-law.

Forms of eldfather

pluraleldfathers

Origin of eldfather

From Middle English eldfader, variant of olde fader, from Old English eald fæder (“grandfather, ancestor”), equivalent to eld (“old”) + father. Cognate with Scots eldfader (“grandfather, father-in-law”), Old Frisian aldafeder (“grandfather”).

Questions about eldfather

What does eldfather mean?
Eldfather means one's grandfather or forefather.
What part of speech is eldfather?
Eldfather is a noun.
What is the plural of eldfather?
The plural of eldfather is eldfathers.

Words near eldfather in the dictionary

  1. elderwomen
  2. elderwood
  3. elderwort
  4. eldest
  5. eldests
  6. eldfather
  7. eldfathers
  8. eldfellite
  9. elding
  10. Eldings
  11. eldmother

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: eldfather (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “eldfather.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/eldfather. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.