breed·ing
(brḗdĭng)
noun
- One's line of descent; ancestry: a person of noble breeding.
- Training in the proper forms of social and personal conduct.
- Production of offspring or young.
- The propagation of animals or plants.
breed
(brēd)
[Middle English breden, from Old English brēdan.]
verb: bred (brĕd), breed·ing, breeds.
transitive verb
- To produce (offspring); give birth to or hatch.
- To bring about; engender: “Admission of guilt tends to breed public sympathy” (Jonathan Alter)
- To cause to reproduce, especially by controlled mating and selection: breed cattle.
- To develop new or improved strains in (organisms), chiefly through controlled mating and selection of offspring for desirable traits.
- To inseminate or impregnate; mate with.
- To rear or train; bring up: a writer who was bred in a seafaring culture.
- To be the place of origin of: Austria breeds great skiers.
- To produce (fissionable material) in a breeder reactor.
intransitive verb
- To produce offspring.
- To copulate; mate.
- To originate and develop: Mischief breeds in bored minds.
noun
- A group of organisms having common ancestors and certain distinguishable characteristics, especially a group within a species developed by artificial selection and maintained by controlled propagation.
- A kind; a sort: a new breed of politician; a new breed of computer.
- Offensive A person of mixed racial descent; a half-breed.
idioms
- breed a scab on (one's) nose
- To stir up trouble for oneself.
- breed up a storm
- To become cloudy.
