dad
/dæd/ noun, verb, proper noun
Forms dads dadding dadded dadde dod dodge dadge
- noun (informal) A father, a male parent. “His dad was always there for him.”
- noun Used to address one's father; often capitalized. “Happy Father's Day, dad!”
- noun (slang) Used to address an older adult male.
- verb To be a father to; to parent.
- verb To act like a dad.
- noun A lump or piece.
- noun A blow; act of striking something.
- verb (transitive) To throw against something; to dash.
- proper noun (informal) One’s father. “Dad told me to go out and mow the lawn.”
- noun (sound engineering) A designation on prerecorded compact discs indicating that the contents were recorded in digital but mixed in analog before being mastered to a digital medium.
Synonyms
ayr ba baba da dada daddio daddy father fatherling governor old man pa pap papa papa bear papaw pappaw pappy pater patriarch pappa pop
Etymology
From Early Modern English dadd, dadde (circa 1500), undoubtedly older, from unrecorded Middle English *dadde, of uncertain ultimate origin. Compare West Frisian deite (“dad, daddy”), Swabian Dede (“Godfather”).
* Perhaps of Celtic origin, compare Welsh and Breton tad (from Proto-Brythonic *tad), Old Irish data; and possibly related to Russian дя́дя (djádja, “uncle”) and/or Russian де́душка (déduška, “grandfather”), all imitative. In Welsh, when subject to soft mutation (which occurs in vocative contexts, among others), tad becomes dad.
* Perhaps imitative of a child's first uttered syllables da, da.
* Possibly from a metathetic variation of a hypothetical Old English *ætta, *atta (“father”), from Proto-West Germanic *attō, from Proto-Germanic *attô ("father, forefather"; whence also North Frisian ate, aatj, taatje, tääte (“father; dad”), Middle High German tate (“father, dad”) (whence German Tate (“dad”), Bavarian tatte (“dad”), Cimbrian tatta (“dad”)), Icelandic táta (“dad”)), from Proto-Indo-European *átta (“father”), whence Sanskrit तत (tata, “father”).
From dade (“to strike heavily”), dade (“a heavy blow or thud”). Probably onomatopoeic.
Proprialisation of dad.
Webster’s 1913
Etymology [Prob. of Celtic origin; cf. Ir. daid, Gael. daidein, W. tad, OL. , , Skr. tata.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “dad”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details