Bred

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /bɹɛd/

Definitions

1. The past tense and past participle of the verb meaning to produce offspring or to cause to develop
2. Used to indicate the previous action of generating young or cultivating traits in living beings
3. Serving as the past form of a verb that refers to producing descendants or nurturing qualities

Etymology: The past tense of "breed" comes from a verb whose original sense had nothing to do with animals or families. Its ancestor was Old English "bredan", meaning to roast or to cook on a griddle, and the connection to producing offspring only arrived later in English. Words for brood and breeding are rooted in ideas of warmth and hatching eggs, which may explain why the two senses drifted toward each other, though the exact path is not something the record spells out cleanly. The source for this verb traces it to Middle English "bred", a form of a noun meaning a board, plank or table, which shares its root with "braid" in the sense of spreading or weaving out. Here the verb has inherited a historical kinship it never openly advertised: the same stem produced the everyday word for a loaf in modern dialects, and "bread" and "breed" both grew from roots in English that were far older than their current meanings.

Synonyms: produced, raised, nurtured, reared, cultivated

Antonyms: destroyed, abandoned, neglected, disregarded, lost