ancestor
an animal that lives after and is related to another animal that lived in the past:
descendant ofLemurs are descendants of the earliest primates.
something that is similar to and influenced by something that existed before it:
descendant ofFreeride skiing is a hybrid, trick-oriented descendant of skateboarding and snowboarding.
The file-sharing service and its descendants allowed users to download music for free.
Most of these people are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Surely our descendants will wonder why we didn't notice, why we did nothing about greenhouse gases.
These wild horses are the living descendants of untold generations of Ozarks history.
He hopes descendants of these monkeys will spread beyond the reserve to repopulate nearby mountains.
What makes these mutations particularly dangerous is that they are passed down from a cell to all its descendants.
This celebrated Coen brothers debut is a worthy descendant of classic 1940s film noir.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Family: ancestors & descendants
ancestor
ancestral
ancestry
be in the/someone's bloodidiom
blood is thicker than wateridiom
distaff
family tree
forbear
forebear
forefather
genealogy
generation
generationally
heraldic
heraldically
heraldry
progenitor
run in the familyidiom
sandwich generation
successor

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Plants & animals - general words
Replacing and exchanging
Change and changes

descendant | American Dictionary

descendant
noun[ C ]
us/dɪˈsen·dənt/
a person related to someone from an earlier generation (= all the people of about the same age within a particular family):
The Pennsylvania Dutch are descendants of early German immigrants.

Examples of descendant

descendant
Therefore, growth rates may increase over time simply because the initial and descendant cells are recovering from treatment rather than evolving.
Later they absorbed the surviving nomadic descendants of the authentic autochtons.
The binding will only be visible in the current space and its descendants.
Ancestors, by contrast, were continuous and consubstantial with their descendants, which guaranteed their human approachability.
And these masks, in turn, are most likely descendants of medieval devil clowns.
For women and religious titleholders, our models suggest a potent and statistically meaningful connection between the father's religious title and his descendant's wealth.
Nor does one have any control over what an offspring may do to a third or subseqent generations of descendants.
As a person's descendants branch out over successive generations, each generation gains only a portion of the earlier generation's claim.
Within each continent of origin there are no differences in standardized mean birth weights of descendants of the different component countries, with only three exceptions.
For one group of their descendants, the magic strainer through which longsuffering language is to be poured is the supposedly sociopolitical criterion of 'sexism'.
Niche-constructing organisms may also substantially modify the environment of their offspring, and even more distant descendants.
This means, by recursion, that even if we don't care directly for the well-being of our distant descendants, we do care for them indirectly.
The vast majority of adult descendants were married, widowed or divorced.
In other cases descendants of siblings could be given priority over the offspring of the deceased.
It extended to all lineal descendants of the degraded individual born subsequent to the act resulting in degradation.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withdescendant

descendant

These are words often used in combination with descendant.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

direct descendant
We are left in no doubt that we are dealing with a directdescendant of the animal whose special gift was the multiplication of words.
lineal descendant
I suggest that there is an alternative, and that is its linealdescendant, the basic income guarantee scheme.
From the
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