Other forms: prodigies
A prodigy is a child who can already do something at the level of an adult master. The eight-year-old playing a whole concerto from memory; the twelve-year-old sitting down against grandmasters and winning.
The phrase you will meet is child prodigy, which says the same thing twice and has stuck anyway. The fields are the ones where skill shows early: music, chess, mathematics, sport now and then. Its older meaning is a marvel or a wonder, something so remarkable it stops people — a prodigy of engineering — and that sense is what stands behind prodigious, meaning enormous. Three words sit close enough to trip you: progeny means offspring, a protégé is someone a mentor is training, and neither of them is a prodigy. The plural is prodigies.
1nounprodigyA young person with an extraordinary talent, at a level normally reached only by adults.
“She was a chess prodigy who beat her first grandmaster at eleven.”
synonyms: genius, wunderkind
2nounamazingAn amazing or extraordinary thing.
“The bridge was thought a prodigy of engineering when it opened.”
prodigy is an exceptionally gifted person.
A prodigy was once a warning from the sky. Latin prodigium meant an omen or a prophetic sign — the unnatural event that Romans read for meaning — and it entered Middle English as prodige, a portent. From the marvel that frightened people to the child who astonishes them is a short walk.
Proto-Indo-European
*per-
Latin
prōdigium — omen, portent, prophetic sign
Middle English
prodige — portent
English, today
prodigy
From Middle English prodige (“portent”), from Latin prōdigium (“omen, portent, prophetic sign”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA