Posterities

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The condition of being succeeded by future generations or descendants
2. The concept of all future generations stemming from the current one
3. A term that encompasses all the descendants that will come after the present population

Etymology: "Posterities" is simply the plural of "posterity," so the word is about the whole line of people who will come after us. The singular has been in English since the late 1300s, borrowed through Middle French "posterité" from Latin "posteritas," a noun built on "posterus," meaning "following" or "coming after." That Latin adjective rests on "post," "after," which is the same prefix you see in "postpone" and "postwar." Latin "posteritas" was a fairly ordinary word for the state of being later or future, and English kept that forward-looking sense. The plural form, "posterities," is much rarer than the singular and is used when a writer wants to speak of successive generations as separate groups rather than as one body.

Synonyms: descendants, offspring, future generations, heirs, successors