Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The organism or organisms resulting from sexual or asexual reproduction.
  • noun A child or children of a parent or parents.
  • noun The result or product of something.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Origin; descent; family.
  • noun Propagation; generation.
  • noun Progeny; descendants, however remote from the stock; issue: a collective term, applied to several or all descendants (sometimes, exceptionally, to collateral branches), or to one child if the sole descendant.
  • noun Synonyms Offspring, Issue, Progeny, Posterity, Descendants. Offspring and progeny apply to the young of man or beast; the rest usually only to the human race. Offspring and issue usually imply more than one, but may refer to one only; progeny and posterity refer to more than one, and generally to many: offspring and issue refer generally to the first generation, the rest to as many generations as there may be in the case, posterity and descendants necessarily covering more than one. Issue is almost always a legal or genealogical term, referring to a child or children of one who has died. Posterity implies an indefinite future of descent.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete The act of production; generation.
  • noun That which is produced; a child or children; a descendant or descendants, however remote from the stock.
  • noun obsolete Origin; lineage; family.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A person's daughter(s) and/or son(s); a person's children.
  • noun All a person's descendants, including further generations.
  • noun An animal or plant's progeny, an animal or plant's young.
  • noun figuratively Another produce, result of an entity's efforts.
  • noun computing A process launched by another process.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the immediate descendants of a person
  • noun something that comes into existence as a result
  • noun any immature animal

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English ofspring, from Old English : of, off; see off + springan, to rise.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English ofspring, from Old English ofspring ("offspring, descendants, posterity"), equivalent to off- +‎ spring. Compare Icelandic afspringr ("offspring"). More at off, spring.

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