engender
verb
Did you know?
A good paragraph about engender will engender understanding in the reader. Like its synonym generate, engender comes from the Latin verb generare, meaning “to generate” or “to beget,” and when the word was first used in the 14th century, engender meant “propagate” or “procreate.” That literal meaning having to do with creating offspring (which generate shared when it was adopted in the early 16th century) was soon joined by the “to cause to exist or develop; to produce” meaning most familiar to us today. Generare didn’t just engender generate and engender; regenerate, degenerate, and generation have the same Latin root. As you might suspect, the list of engender relatives does not end there. Generare comes from the Latin noun genus, meaning “origin” or “kind.” From this source we took our own word genus, plus gender, general, and generic, among other words.
Examples of engender in a Sentence
Lorraine Ali, Mercury News, 5 Aug. 2025
Still, the circumstances that engendered Gee’s conversion are not so different from what led to my own deconversion as a cradle Catholic.
—Terry Nguyen
july 23, Literary Hub, 23 July 2025
And still, the fact their relationship has sustained despite their being teammates for only one season during radically different moments in their careers is a testament to the loyalty SGA can engender.
—Rohan Nadkarni, NBC news, 9 June 2025
The result is a core ensemble full of characters who are fleshed out just enough to be vessels for jokes and plot but not enough to engender the kind of emotional audience buy-in necessary for the long-term cultural penetration of a show like this.
—Hershal Pandya, Vulture, 4 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for engender
Cite this Entry
“Engender.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engender. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025.
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engender
verb
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