MEANING
1. A person, animal, or plant from which later generations are directly descended.
2. A person or thing that starts or gives rise to a later development.
Use it for
describing the ancestry of a family or species; identifying an earlier source of a biological line; giving a lineage a formal or mythic registerConnects direct biological ancestry with the intellectual or material origin of something that develops later. Writing functions: Lineage / Origins.
Words that belong together
- a common progenitor
- a distant progenitor
- the progenitor of a lineage
On the page
The families claimed a common progenitor whose name survived only in a damaged register.
In the oldest story, the sea creature was the progenitor of every living thing on the island.
The forgotten radio serial became the progenitor of a much larger fictional world.
Her workshop is regarded as a progenitor of the cooperative movement that followed.
Word forms
- Base
- progenitor
Usage notes
Countable noun: progenitor; plural progenitors. Common pattern: a progenitor of a person, lineage, idea, or later development. Register: formal. Commonness: uncommon (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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