From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A daughter is a female offspring; a girl, woman, or female animal in relation to her parents. The male equivalent is a son.
In patriarchal societies, daughters often enjoy different or lesser familial rights than sons. A family may prefer to have sons rather than daughters, with the daughters subjected to female infanticide. In some societies it is the custom for a daughter to be 'sold' to her husband, who must pay a bride price. The reverse of this custom, where the parents pay the husband a sum of money to compensate for the financial burden of the woman, is found in societies where women do not labour outside the home, and is referred to as dowry.
In many cases, daughters in a family where there is a son do not inherit. In British heraldry, women with brothers could not inherit their father's coat of arms; though they could display it and impale it with their husband's, they could not pass it to their children. If there were no surviving brothers, all the daughters in the family inherited the coat of arms, becoming heraldic heiresses in their own right. Their marital achievement would then feature the wife's arms on an inescutcheon of pretense, and they could transmit their arms to their children as a quarter.
The term daughter is also sometimes used to refer to offspring in the case of genderless species or cell division, where the parent is referred to as mother. It can also refer to something personified in relation to its source, as in Truth is the daughter of Time.
In physics, a daughter is a nuclide formed by radioactive decay of another.
The term can also refer to the subordinate in any relationship where the superior entity is referred to as mother, for example, a daughter ship.
