descendants
part of speech
noun, plural of descendant (a descendant, descendants)
meaning for a pupil
1) Your descendants are your children, their children, their children's children and so on into the future. tree →
2) (science) Animals or plants that come from an older kind of living thing, like birds being descendants of dinosaurs. tree →
3) Something new that grew out of an older thing (formal), like modern languages from older ones. tree →
sense in the lessons
Used in history, family trees and science (evolution). Phrases: «direct descendants», «descendants of settlers», «have many descendants». It tells the reader about a line going forward in time from a person or creature.
examples
- The old farmer had twenty descendants at his birthday party. tree →
- Birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs. tree →
- Many people in New Zealand are descendants of Māori voyagers. tree →
- Her descendants still live in the same village in Ireland. tree →
- Our class drew a family tree showing a great-grandmother's descendants. tree →
- Dogs are descendants of wolves. tree →
- The queen's descendants include princes and princesses. tree →
- “Descendants are only children,” said John. tree →
note
Opposite: «ancestors» (people who came before you). Spelling trap: the noun is usually «descendant» with -ant; «descendent» with -ent is a rarer adjective spelling. Countable: one descendant, many descendants. In family-tree maths, if each person has 2 children, the number of descendants doubles each generation: 2, 4, 8 …
In the corpora
- God told Abraham to look at the stars and try to count them: his descendants would be as many.
- Birds are living descendants of dinosaurs.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «descendants» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.