Other forms: daughters
A daughter is a girl or woman in relation to her parents. My daughter, their eldest daughter, a daughter of two.
The male equivalent is son. Daughter-in-law is the wife of your child, and stepdaughter is your partner's daughter. As a modifier it means derived from a parent thing: a daughter company, a daughter cell in biology, which is the standard term for the two cells produced by division. Note that the gh in the spelling was once pronounced, as a rough sound still heard in Scots dochter.
1noundaughterA girl or woman in relation to her parents.~70%
“Their daughter runs the business now.”
2nounderivedSomething derived from a parent thing.~30%
“Each division produces two daughter cells.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 23 sentences found in the wild and placed 23 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
daughter is a relative or derived thing.
Old English dohtor descends from Proto-Indo-European dhugheter, one of the most widely surviving words in the family: Greek thygater, Sanskrit duhitar, Russian doch. It has meant the same thing for at least five thousand years.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰugh₂tḗr
Proto-Germanic
*duhtēr
Proto-West Germanic
*dohter
Old English
dohtor — daughter
Middle English
doghter
English, today
daughter
From Middle English doghter, doughter, from Old English dohtor (“daughter”), from Proto-West Germanic dohter, from Proto-Germanic duhtēr, from Proto-Indo-European dʰugh₂tḗr.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA