Daughter

How to spell daughter

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce daughter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does daughter mean?

1. nounA person's female child.

Daughter in a sentence

• Their daughter is studying medicine.

• My daughter starts university in September.

Where does daughter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a very old native word, descending from the Old English dohtor, which simply meant a female child in relation to her parents. It traces back through the Proto-Germanic dohter, a relative of the Dutch dochter and the German Tochter, and ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European root dhugheter, the common ancestor that also gave Greek thugater and Sanskrit duhitar. In the earliest forms the -gh- spelled a throaty consonant that was actually pronounced, much like the sound in the Scottish word loch. Over the centuries English speakers stopped sounding that consonant, but the spelling stubbornly kept the silent gh, which is exactly why the word looks nothing like it sounds. The same fossilised gh haunts its rhyming cousins such as caught and taught, and that frozen letter cluster is the real spelling trap to remember.

How the word is built

• daughter (from Old English dohtor: female child)
• no affixes; the silent -gh- preserves a lost guttural sound