Breeding

How to spell breeding

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce breeding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does breeding mean?

1. nounThe producing of offspring, or the controlled raising and propagation of animals or plants.
2. nounA person's manners or social conduct as shaped by their upbringing and training.

Breeding in a sentence

• The farm specialises in the breeding of rare cattle.

• Her calm reply to the rude customer showed real breeding.

• Selective breeding has improved the yield of these wheat varieties.

• His careless behaviour at dinner suggested a lack of breeding.

Where does breeding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly from the Old English verb brēdan, which meant 'to keep warm', 'to nourish', or 'to bring forth young', and which is itself related to brōd, the ancestor of the modern word 'brood'. The underlying idea was the warmth a parent bird gives its eggs, so the earliest sense centred on hatching and nurturing offspring rather than on selecting parents. By the late medieval period 'breeding' had broadened to cover the deliberate raising and propagation of animals and plants, and from the 1500s it took on a figurative meaning for the rearing and training of people, which is why we still speak of a person's 'good breeding'. The word stayed firmly Germanic and never picked up a Latin or French rival, so its spelling has remained refreshingly regular. The main thing to watch is the doubled 'e' of the stem, which echoes the long vowel in 'breed' and 'feed', plus the ordinary '-ing' ending.

How the word is built

• breed (from Old English brēdan: to nourish, keep warm, produce young)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)