descendant
/dɪˈsɛnd(ə)nt
/noun
1A person, plant, or animal that is descended from a particular ancestor: she’s a descendant of Charles Darwin...
- Most biologists consider it the direct descendant of the ancestor of the domesticated two-humped species.
- People also expect the deceased to maintain interest in their descendants, as ancestral spirits.
- Some of the plaintiffs are direct descendants of those early settlers.
Synonyms
successor, scion;
offshoot, heir;
(descendants) offspring, progeny, issue, family, lineage, line
archaic posterity, seed, fruit, fruit of someone's loins
1.1A machine, artefact, system, etc., that has developed from an earlier, more rudimentary version: house music is a descendant of disco...
- The project is a direct descendant of the Learning Design Tools project and other predecessor projects in the E-learning and Pedagogy programme.
- An argument can be made that since so many Cajun pioneers copied the Creole accordionist that Cajun music is a descendant of Creole music. But that's another column.
- The internet is not the descendant of the telephone, nor has it replaced it.
Usage
The correct spelling for the noun meaning ‘person descended from a particular ancestor’ is descendant, not -ent. Descendent is a less common adjective meaning ‘descending from an ancestor’. Almost 15 per cent of the citations for the term in the Oxford English Corpus use the wrong spelling.
Origin
Late Middle English (as an adjective in the sense 'descending'): from French, present participle of descendre 'to descend' (see descend). The noun dates from the early 17th century.