Stepdoughter

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A child of your husband or wife from an earlier marriage or relationship, who is not your own biological daughter
2. The daughter that a person's spouse brought from a former partnership, making her a stepchild rather than a blood relation
3. A female child belonging to your partner by a previous union, raised within your household as a member of the family

Etymology: Stepdaughter is a compound of "step-" and "daughter," and the "step-" element is the more interesting half. It comes from Old English "stēop-," tied to a verb meaning "to bereave" or "to orphan," so a stepchild was originally a child who had lost a parent. The prefix once appeared in words such as "stepmother" and "stepfather" in the same way, always marking a relation created when a parent died and the survivor remarried. Over time the sense shifted. A stepdaughter came to mean a daughter brought into a family by remarriage, whether or not a parent had died. The "step-" prefix kept its older bereavement meaning in the background, which is why the word can still carry a faint trace of loss.

Synonyms: stepdaughter