Word.ws English Dictionary

love-child

love-child is the alternative spelling of love child.

Meaning of love child

Noun

love child (plural love children)

  1. (euphemistic) A child born as a result of a romantic liaison between parents not married to one another; an illegitimate child.
    • Two thousand a-year without debt or drawback — except for the little love-child, indeed; aye, I had forgot her; but she may be 'prenticed out at a small cost, and then what does it signify?1811, Jane Austen, chapter 30, in Sense and Sensibility
  2. Something that includes influences of multiple predecessors.
    • The grunge genre was the love child of punk and metal.

Forms of love-child

plurallove-children

Origin of love-child

From love + child.

Questions about love-child

What is love-child the alternative spelling of?
Love-child is the alternative spelling of love child.

Words near love-child in the dictionary

  1. love-bites
  2. love-bomb
  3. love-bombed
  4. love-bombing
  5. love-bombs
  6. love-child
  7. love-children
  8. love-feat
  9. love-feats
  10. love-hair
  11. love-handled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: love-child (page history and authors); love child (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: “love-child.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/love-child. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.