Noun

(en noun)

One who protects or supports; a defender.

* Shakespeare

patron of my life and liberty

* Spenser

the patron of true holiness

A regular customer, as of a certain store or restaurant.

This car park is for patrons only.

A property owner who hires a contractor for construction works.

An influential, wealthy person who supported an artist, craftsman, a scholar or a noble.

(historical, Roman antiquity) A master who had freed his slave but still retained some paternal rights over him.

An advocate or pleader.

* Macaulay

Let him who works the client wrong / Beware the patron' s ire.

(UK, ecclestiastical) One who has gift and disposition of a benefice.

(nautical) A padrone.

Noun

(en noun)

One of the two persons from whom one is immediately biologically descended; a mother or father.

My twin sister says she loves our parents , but honestly, I dislike them .

* c. 1595 , (William Shakespeare), The Tempest , First Folio 1623, I.2:

my trust / Like a good parent , did beget of him / A falsehood in it's contrarie, as great / As my trust was, which had indeede no limit, / A confidence sans bound.

*

And they asked them, saying, Is this your son, who ye say was born blind? how then doth he now see? His parents answered them and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind [...].

* 2005 , Siobhan O'Neill, The Guardian , 24 Aug 2005:

The NHS is naturally pro-immunisation, reassuring parents that their babies can easily cope with these jabs.

A person who acts as a parent in rearing a child; a step-parent or adoptive parent.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=(Joseph Stiglitz)

, volume=188, issue=26, page=19, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Globalisation is about taxes too , passage=It is time the international community faced the reality: we have an unmanageable, unfair, distortionary global tax regime. […] It is the starving of the public sector which has been pivotal in America no longer being the land of opportunity – with a child's life prospects more dependent on the income and education of its parents than in other advanced countries.}}

(obsolete) A relative.

The source or origin of something.

* 1785 , (Thomas Jefferson), Notes on the State of Virginia :

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.

(biology) An organism from which a plant or animal is immediately biologically descended.

(label) Sponsor, supporter, owner, protector.

*{{quote-book, year=1944, author=(w)

, title= The Three Corpse Trick, section=chapter 5 , passage=The dinghy was trailing astern at the end of its painter, and Merrion looked at it as he passed. He saw that it was a battered-looking affair of the prahm type, with a blunt snout, and like the parent ship, had recently been painted a vivid green.}}

# A parent company.

#* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=68, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= T time , passage=The ability to shift profits to low-tax countries by locating intellectual property in them

(computing) The object from which a child or derived object is descended; a node superior to another node.