progenitor
/prə(ʊ)ˈdʒɛnɪtə
/noun
1A person or thing from which a person, animal, or plant is descended or originates; an ancestor or parent: his children were the progenitors of many of Scotland’s noble families...
- Boxes represent extant groups and their ancestral progenitors.
- For example, the unicellular progenitors of plants underwent an important evolutionary step following the establishment of a second endosymbiotic relationship, resulting in the evolution of the plastid.
- The domestication of plants from their wild progenitors has led to the production of a wide variety of crops that share a number of traits.
Synonyms
ancestor, forefather, forebear, parent
archaic begetter
rare primogenitor, procreator, stirps
1.1A person who originates a cultural or intellectual movement: the progenitor of modern jazz...
- Both international law and domestic legal norms in the Christian world had roots in an accepted morality and in natural law, and had common intellectual progenitors (including Grotius, Locke, Vattel).
- Instead, she bestows a life and a self on modernity that seems to be independent of politics or its intellectual progenitors, and can therefore be whatever the author wants.
- The record, and the subsequent Live Aid concerts, yoked the two men together as blood-oath crusaders against the famine in Ethiopia, the progenitors of popular culture's most decisive intervention into global politics.
Synonyms
originator, founder, instigator, source;
forerunner, predecessor, precursor, antecedent
Derivatives
progenitorial
progenitorship
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French progeniteur, from Latin progenitor, from progenit- 'begotten', from the verb progignere, from pro- 'forward' + gignere 'beget'.