Adjacent Words

Breeding definitions

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Webster's 1828 Dictionary

BREE'DING, ppr. Bearing and nourishing, as a fetus; engendering; producing; educating.
BREE'DING, n. The act of generating or of producing.
1. The raising of a breed or breeds; as, the farmer attends to the breeding of sheep.
2. Nurture; education; instruction; formation of manners.
She had her breeding at my father's charge.
3. By way of eminence, manners; knowledge of ceremony; deportment or behavior in the external offices and decorums of social life. Hence good breeding is politeness, or the qualifications which constitute genteel deportment.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

adj
1: producing offspring or set aside especially for producing offspring; "the breeding population"; "retained a few bulls for breeding purposes" n
1: elegance by virtue of fineness of manner and expression [syn: breeding, genteelness, gentility]
2: the result of good upbringing (especially knowledge of correct social behavior); "a woman of breeding and refinement" [syn: education, training, breeding]
3: helping someone grow up to be an accepted member of the community; "they debated whether nature or nurture was more important" [syn: breeding, bringing up, fostering, fosterage, nurture, raising, rearing, upbringing]
4: the production of animals or plants by inbreeding or hybridization
5: the sexual activity of conceiving and bearing offspring [syn: reproduction, procreation, breeding, facts of life]

Merriam Webster's

noun Date: 14th century 1. the action or process of bearing or generating 2. ancestry 3. a. archaic education <she had her breeding at my father's charge — Shakespeare> b. training in or observance of the proprieties 4. the sexual propagation of plants or animals

Britannica Concise

Application of genetic principles in animal husbandry, agriculture, and horticulture to improve desirable qualities. Ancient agriculturists improved many plants through selective cultivation. Modern plant breeding centers on pollination; pollen from the chosen male plant, and no other pollen, must be transferred to the female plant. Animal breeding consists of choosing the ideal trait (e.g., fine wool, high milk production), selecting the breeding stock, and determining the mating system (e.g., whether mating animals are unrelated, mildly related, or highly inbred).

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. 1 the process of developing or propagating (animals, plants, etc.). 2 generation; childbearing. 3 the result of training or education; behaviour. 4 good manners (as produced by an aristocratic heredity) (has no breeding).

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Breed Breed, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Bred; p. pr. & vb. n. Breeding.] [OE. breden, AS. br[=e]dan to nourish, cherish, keep warm, from br[=o]d brood; akin to D. broeden to brood, OHG. bruoten, G. br["u]ten. See Brood.] 1. To produce as offspring; to bring forth; to bear; to procreate; to generate; to beget; to hatch. Yet every mother breeds not sons alike. --Shak. If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog. --Shak. 2. To take care of in infancy, and through the age of youth; to bring up; to nurse and foster. To bring thee forth with pain, with care to breed. --Dryden. Born and bred on the verge of the wilderness. --Everett. 3. To educate; to instruct; to form by education; to train; -- sometimes followed by up. But no care was taken to breed him a Protestant. --Bp. Burnet. His farm may not remove his children too far from him, or the trade he breeds them up in. --Locke. 4. To engender; to cause; to occasion; to originate; to produce; as, to breed a storm; to breed disease. Lest the place And my quaint habits breed astonishment. --Milton. 5. To give birth to; to be the native place of; as, a pond breeds fish; a northern country breeds stout men. 6. To raise, as any kind of stock. 7. To produce or obtain by any natural process. [Obs.] Children would breed their teeth with less danger. --Locke. Syn: To engender; generate; beget; produce; hatch; originate; bring up; nourish; train; instruct.

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Breeding Breed"ing, n. 1. The act or process of generating or bearing. 2. The raising or improving of any kind of domestic animals; as, farmers should pay attention to breeding. 3. Nurture; education; formation of manners. She had her breeding at my father's charge. --Shak. 4. Deportment or behavior in the external offices and decorums of social life; manners; knowledge of, or training in, the ceremonies, or polite observances of society. Delicacy of breeding, or that polite deference and respect which civility obliges us either to express or counterfeit towards the persons with whom we converse. --Hume. 5. Descent; pedigree; extraction. [Obs.] Honest gentlemen, I know not your breeding. --Shak. Close breeding, In and in breeding, breeding from a male and female from the same parentage. Cross breeding, breeding from a male and female of different lineage. Good breeding, politeness; genteel deportment. Syn: Education; instruction; nurture; training; manners. See Education.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

If someone says that a person has breeding, they mean that they think the person is from a good social background and has good manners. It's a sign of good breeding to know the names of all your staff. see also breed

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

n. 1. Procreation, having or begetting offspring, bearing, bringing forth. 2. Nurture, education, discipline, instruction, training, schooling, rearing, upbringing. 3. Deportment, manners.

Moby Thesaurus

alpha decay, animal husbandry, animal rearing, apprenticeship, atom-chipping, atom-smashing, atomic disintegration, atomic reaction, atomization, basic training, bee culture, beekeeping, begetting, beta decay, bombardment, breaking, bullet, cattle-ranching, chain reaction, chicken-farming, civility, cleavage, conditioning, courtesy, crossbreeding, cultivation, culture, dairy-farming, development, discipline, disintegration series, dissociation, dissogeny, dressage, drill, drilling, elegance, endogamy, engenderment, exchange reaction, exercise, fetching-up, fission, fission reaction, fostering, gamma decay, generation, genteelness, gentility, gentlemanlikeness, gentlemanliness, gentleness, gnotobiotics, good behavior, good breeding, good manners, grace, grazing, grooming, herding, horse training, horsemanship, housebreaking, improvement, in-service training, inbreeding, ionization, ladylikeness, linebreeding, manual training, military training, mink-ranching, multiplication, neutron reaction, nonreversible reaction, nuclear fission, nucleization, nurture, nurturing, on-the-job training, outbreeding, photodisintegration, pig-keeping, polish, politeness, politesse, practice, preparation, procreation, proliferation, propagation, proton gun, proton reaction, raising, readying, rearing, refinement, rehearsal, reversible reaction, sheepherding, sloyd, splitting the atom, stimulation, stock raising, stockbreeding, target, thermonuclear reaction, thremmatology, training, upbringing, vocational education, vocational training, xenogamy, zootechnics, zootechny