Word.ws English Dictionary

stepbairn

stepbairn noun: a stepchild.

Noun

stepbairn (plural stepbairns)

  1. (Scotland, UK, dialectal, otherwise obsolete) A stepchild.

Forms of stepbairn

pluralstepbairns
alternative Northern Englandstepbarn

Origin of stepbairn

From Middle English stepbarn (“orphan”), from Old English stēopbearn (“orphan”), from Proto-West Germanic *steupabarn, from Proto-Germanic *steupabarną (“stepchild”), equivalent to step- + bairn. Cognate with Old High German stiofbarn (“stepchild”), Norwegian stebarn (“stepchild”) Danish stedbarn (“stepchild”), Swedish styvbarn (“stepchild”), Icelandic stjúpbarn (“stepchild”).

Questions about stepbairn

What does stepbairn mean?
Stepbairn means a stepchild.
What part of speech is stepbairn?
Stepbairn is a noun.
What is the plural of stepbairn?
The plural of stepbairn is stepbairns.

Words near stepbairn in the dictionary

  1. Stepaside
  2. stepaunt
  3. stepaunts
  4. stepback
  5. stepbacks
  6. stepbairn
  7. stepbairns
  8. stepbarn
  9. stepbarns
  10. stepbrethren
  11. stepbro

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stepbairn (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: “stepbairn.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stepbairn. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.