Other forms: sired, sires, siring
In breeding, the sire is the male parent of an animal, especially a horse or dog. The sire of the foal, a champion sire, sired by.
The female equivalent is the dam, and the pair is standard in pedigrees. As a verb, to sire is to father offspring, used of animals and, in older or literary writing, of people. The other use is as a form of address to a king — Yes, sire — which is archaic and belongs to historical drama. Note that sir is the same word worn down, so a knight and a stallion share an etymology.
1nounsireThe male parent of an animal.
“The sire won two classics and never raced again.”
2nounformA form of address to a king.
“Yes, sire, the messengers left at dawn.”
3verbfatherTo father offspring.
“He sired more than four hundred foals.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
sire is a male parent, or a title.
SIRE → what you say to the king by the FIRE
Yes, my king: the word you use when you speak to him by the fire, and also the word for the father of a horse.
hooks ontofire
Latin senior means older, and it produced sire, sir, senior and, through Spanish and Italian, senor and signor. Every one of them addresses a man by calling him older, which is how respect was expressed across half of Europe.
Proto-Indo-European
*sénos
Latin
senior
Old French
sire
Middle English
sire
English, today
sire
From Middle English sire, from Old French sire, the nominative singular of seignor; from Latin senior, from senex. a doublet of seigneur and seignior and senhor and senior and señor and senyor and signore and sir. Cognate with French monsieur.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA