BREEDING • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Breeding

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/brˈidɪŋ/ Listen

noun

Breeding n.

The act or process of generating or bearing.

The raising or improving of any kind of domestic animals; as, farmers should pay attention to breeding.

Nurture; education; formation of manners. "She had her breeding at my father's charge."

Deportment or behavior in the external offices and decorums of social life; manners; knowledge of, or training in, the ceremonies, or polite observances of society. "Delicacy of breeding, or that polite deference and respect which civility obliges us either to express or counterfeit towards the persons with whom we converse."

Descent; pedigree; extraction. (Obs.) "Honest gentlemen, I know not your breeding."

Close breeding, In and in breeding, breeding from a male and female from the same parentage.

Cross breeding, breeding from a male and female of different lineage.

Good breeding, politeness; genteel deportment.

Synonyms: Education; instruction; nurture; training; manners. See Education.

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Etymology of 'Breeding'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Breeding" Quotes from Famous Books

... some geometric ratio, which characterizes all living organisms, means that any species, if left to itself, would soon reach such numbers as to occupy the whole earth. Darwin showed, for example, that though the elephant is the slowest breeding of all animals, if every elephant lived its normal length of life (one hundred years) and to every pair were born six offspring, then, at the end of seven hundred years there would be nineteen million living elephants descended from a single pair. This illustration shows the enormous possibilities ...

— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... between individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity ...

— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... himself devoutly, and muttered half-a-dozen Ave Marias in succession, while Amyas rode silently by his side, utterly puzzled at this strange compound of shrewdness with fanaticism, of perfect high-breeding with a boastfulness which in an Englishman would have been the ...

— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... with a transparent simplicity which was perhaps as good as that which is called good breeding, "whether you would take ...

— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... in prosperity, in dark days as in bright days, always cheerful, always sincere, earnest, and truthful, and so that his kindness be met, always happy, I like. He is your true nobility of nature below the human. But there are 'curs of low degree;' dogs of neither genial instinct nor breeding; senseless animals, that belie the noble nature of their species, are living libels upon their kind. There was one of these over against my rooms, at the time of the sickness I speak of. I say was for thanks to the fates, ...

— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

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