Noun

(en noun)

An ancestor.

* [1906] 2004, Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville, Ethel Wedgwood tr.

Sirs, I am quite sure that the King of England's forbears rightly and justly lost the conquered lands that I hold [...]

* [1936] 2004, Raymond William Firth, We the Tikopia [http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=Eiji-EnuhXUC&pg=PA345&lpg=PA345&sig=aB2VV0fcWv6lkQPQatQQbDhlm_8]

One does not take one’s family name therefrom, and again the position of the mother in that group is determined through her father and his male forbears in turn; this too is a patrilineal group.

* 1997, H. L. Hix, Understanding W. S. Merwin [http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=8JIveUt8StQC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&sig=_AETFoZUYlti38_Va0zOHD4yZTk]

Beginning with the bald declaration “I think I was cold in the womb,” the speaker in “The Forbears'” then decides that his brother (who died soon after birth) must also have been cold in the womb, like his grandfather John and the ' forbears who antedated John.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author=(Jonathan Freedland)

, volume=189, issue=1, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Obama's once hip brand is now tainted , passage=Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.}}

Noun

(en noun)

(literally) One who is the progeny of a specified person, at any distance of time or through any number of generations.

''The patriarch survived many descendants : five children, a dozen grandchildren, even a great grandchild.

(figuratively) A thing that derives directly from a given precursor or source.

''This famous medieval manuscript has many descendants .

(biology) A later evolutionary type.

''Dogs evolved as descendants of early wolves.

(linguistics) A language that is descended from another.

English and Scots are the descendants of Old English.

(linguistics) A word or form in one language that is descended from a counterpart in an ancestor language.

* 1993 , Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, “The Slavic i''-verbs with an excursus on the Indo-European ''?''-verbs”, in Bela Brogyanyi and Reiner Lipp (editors), ''Comparative-Historical Linguistics , John Benjamins Publishing, ISBN 978-90-272-3598-5, page 479:

The direct descendant of this form is the Slavic aorist: Sb.-Cr. n?s?'', ''d?nos? .