Upberynge

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Archaic term for rearing or nurturing someone to adulthood ; lifting or raising something upward from a lower position
2. Old word meaning to bring up a young person through care and teaching ; to hoist or elevate something higher than before
3. A medieval verb for nurturing and raising a child to maturity ; a verb describing the act of lifting something up off a surface

Etymology: "Upberynge" is a Middle English word, recorded in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it means the rearing or bringing up of a child. It is built from "up" and "bringen" (the Middle English ancestor of "bring"), with the noun ending "-ing" marking it as an action or process. The "-e" at the end and the spelling "-ynge" reflect the variable spelling of Middle English, when scribes had no standard orthography. The combination is transparent: to "bring up" a child meant to carry them through infancy and childhood, the same sense that survives in the modern phrasal verb. The noun form appears in the period's religious and household writing, where it referred to the proper training of the young. Because it was a compound of ordinary native words rather than a borrowing, "upberynge" has no foreign root to trace. Its story is simply that English speakers in the medieval period joined "up" and "bring" to name a familiar human task, and the phrase later settled into the modern "upbringing."

Synonyms: upbringing, rearing, nurture, breeding

Antonyms: neglect