Other forms: fathers
Your father is your male parent. My father, her father, become a father.
Dad is the everyday word and father the formal one — most English speakers say dad to their father and father about him. It is also the title of a Catholic or Anglican priest, capitalised and used before the name: Father Michael. The father of something is the person who began it: the father of modern chemistry. Note father-in-law, godfather, grandfather and forefathers, and that fathom, father figure and Founding Fathers all belong to the same wide family of uses.
1nounfatherYour male parent.~92%
“Her father taught her to drive on a beach.”
synonyms: dad, papa
2nounpriestA priest, used as a title.~2%
“Father Michael has been here for thirty years.”
3nounbeganThe person who began something.~6%
“He is called the father of the modern game.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
father is a parent.
Also accepted in games: dad, papa
Old English fæder goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root that also gave Latin pater, Greek pater and Sanskrit pitar — one of the small handful of words that survives recognisably across the whole family. The English f where Latin has p is Grimm's law, the sound shift that also turns Latin pes into foot.
Proto-Indo-European
*peh₂-
Middle English
fader
English, today
father
From Middle English fader. a doublet of ayr and faeder and athair and padre and pater and père.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA