Word.ws English Dictionary

fatherling

fatherling noun: a father.

Noun

fatherling (plural fatherlings)

  1. (derogatory, diminutive, endearing) A father.
    • Katherine Ivanovna rose from her chair, and in an outwardly calm voice (though she turned pale and her chest was heaving) told her that if she once more made so bold as to put her “dirty little fatherling" in the same class with her own dear papa, [...]2006, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
  2. A father's child.
    • Because P (parent) and Ch (child) elide gender distinctions, Gould substitutes two pairs of terms: F (father) and F (fatherling, or man's child); [...]2012, Thomas R. Trautmann, Peter M. Whiteley, Crow-Omaha

Forms of fatherling

pluralfatherlings

Origin of fatherling

From father + -ling.

Questions about fatherling

What does fatherling mean?
Fatherling means a father.
What part of speech is fatherling?
Fatherling is a noun.
What is the plural of fatherling?
The plural of fatherling is fatherlings.

Words near fatherling in the dictionary

  1. fatherlike
  2. fatherlily
  3. fatherline
  4. fatherlines
  5. fatherliness
  6. fatherling
  7. fatherlings
  8. fatherly
  9. fatherness
  10. fathers
  11. Fathers Christmas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fatherling (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.

Last updated:

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