posterity

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Future generations

Nouns

1. posterity, progeny, issue, fruit, seed, offspring, young, flesh and blood; brood, litter, farrow, spawn, spat, clutch, seed, product; [extended, institutional, or nuclear] family, children, grandchildren, heirs; younger, rising, or succeeding generation; empty nester. See futurity.

2. child, son, daughter, grandchild, grandson, granddaughter, bantling, bairn, baby, infant; scion, shoot, sprout, sprit, [olive] branch, offshoot, offset, ramification; descendant, heir[ess]; heir apparent or presumptive; chip off the old block; foster child; stepchild, stepson, stepdaughter.

3. bastard, illegitimate or natural child, bantling, love-child, accident. Informal, incident. Slang, whoreson, bell-bastard, left-handed son, momzer, natural-child, off-girl, woods-colt, yard-child.

4. (type of posterity) straight descent, sonship, line, lineage, succession, filiation, primogeniture, heredity; origin, extraction; tribe, clan, sept, nationality; genealogy; generation gap. See ancestry, humanity.

Verbs — run in the family, come down; pass on.

Adjectives — filial, sonly, daughterly, family; lineal, hereditary; tribal, national; bastard, illegitimate, born out of wedlock, misbegotten, chanceborn, adulterine, baseborn, of unknown birth.

Phrases — great oaks from little acorns grow; like father, like son; like mother, like daughter.

Quotations — The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children (Edward VIII), Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers (Lewis Mum-ford), Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us (Bible), As the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity (Homer), What has pos terity ever done for me? (Groucho Marx).

Antonyms, see ancestry.

II

(Roget's IV) n.

Syn. progeny, descendants, seed, breed, children, issue, heirs, rising generation, New generation, younger generation, successors, lineage, future time; see also family 1 , offspring .

III

(Roget's 3 Superthesaurus) n.

descendants, following generations, successors, heirs, offspring, progeny.

ANT.: ancestors

IV

(Roget's Thesaurus II) noun A group consisting of those descended directly from the same parents or ancestors: brood, get, issue, offspring, progeny, seed. See KIN.