Meaning & use
breeding
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Meanings
noununcountable
The process of keeping animals or plants and letting them produce young, often to improve their qualities or increase their numbers.
Grammar: No plural and no article: breeding is carefully controlled.
Patterns
- the breeding of something
- breeding for something
- breeding programme
The farm specializes in the breeding of racehorses.
Selective breeding has produced dogs with very different shapes and sizes.
Spring is the main breeding season for many songbirds.
noununcountableold-fashionedformal
Polite manners and refined behavior supposedly learned from a good family background.
Grammar: Usually follows good or fine: a person of good breeding.
Patterns
- a man of good breeding
- show breeding
Her calm courtesy to everyone revealed her good breeding.
In the novel, the heroine is poor but clearly a woman of breeding.
He thought table manners were the true test of breeding.
Common combinations
- selective breeding
- Selective breeding made modern wheat much easier to harvest.
- breeding ground
- Stagnant water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
- breeding season
- Seals gather on the beach during the breeding season.
- captive breeding
- Captive breeding saved the species from extinction.
- breeding program
- The zoo runs a breeding program for rare tortoises.
- good breeding
- Her good breeding showed in the way she thanked the staff.
Synonyms and how they differ
- reproduction
- Reproduction is the broad biological process of producing offspring, while breeding stresses human management of animals or plants.
- husbandry
- Husbandry covers all farm animal care, so breeding is only one part of it.
- upbringing
- Upbringing describes how a child was raised without the class judgment that breeding carries.
- manners
- Manners names the behavior itself, whereas breeding suggests it came from family background.
Word family
Commonly confused: breeding or brooding?
breeding vs brooding
Brooding means sitting on eggs or thinking gloomily; it is not the same as breeding, which is about producing young or good upbringing.
Practice
The charity runs a ___ programme to help rebuild the population of a rare owl.
Choose one answer.
Breeding programme means a planned effort to produce young animals. The other options look or sound similar but have unrelated meanings.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “breeding”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.