Descendant

How to spell descendant

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce descendant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does descendant mean?

1. nounA person, animal, or plant that is descended from a particular ancestor.

Descendant in a sentence

• She is a direct descendant of the family that built this house.

• The museum traced each descendant of the original settlers through old parish records.

Where does descendant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb descendere, which literally meant 'to climb down', formed from de- meaning 'down' and scandere meaning 'to climb'. The present participle descendens, with its stem descendent-, described someone or something moving downward, and that idea was carried over into family lines that flow downward from an ancestor to later generations. English borrowed the word through Old French descendant in the 1400s, and it settled into the modern sense of a person who is descended from a particular forebear. The same scandere root climbs through several relatives, including 'ascend', 'transcend', and the noun 'scale'. The classic spelling trap is the ending: although the Latin participle stem was descendent-, the form that won out in English is -ant, so writers who reach for the more familiar -ent suffix go wrong.

How the word is built

• de- (down)
• scend (from Latin scandere: to climb)
• -ant (noun suffix marking a person)