Word.ws English Dictionary

fatherlings

fatherlings is the plural of fatherling.

Meaning of fatherling

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

Questions about fatherlings

What is fatherlings the plural of?
Fatherlings is the plural of fatherling.

Words near fatherlings in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fatherlings (page history and authors); 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.

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