founding father
33
4.6
- noun
- /ˈfaʊndɪŋ ˈfɑːðər/
:
padre fundador
- Many citizens admire the founding fathers for their vision in creating a democratic government.
- founding father of the republic
- one of the founding fathers
- other founding fathers
We stand by our founding fathers, yes.
- We stand by our founding fathers, yes.
- He called Nat Turner one of our founding fathers.
- But, you know, on the other hand, there is that DNA, uh, in, in, in, in the Protestant culture that was, that was the founding fathers of Irish republicanism.
- And so they and all the founding fathers warned us over and over again, watch out for corporations, OK?
- Currently at the pantheon, the resting place where Louis Braille, founding father of Braille, the language for the blind is buried.
- He's Vint and Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet inventor, Co designer of the I of the TCPIP protocols.
- And the founding fathers great sin other than the actual institution of slavery itself was the hypocrisy about it, right.
- Oh, and the founding fathers and all that stuff.
- I'm not saying it's just think it was a founding father who owns Unattributed.
- And you know, what are the ambitions of the founding father or something like that?
- I think based on everything that I've looked at that the founding fathers and these groups, no far more than we realized these groups.
Examples
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George Washington is often referred to as a key founding father of the United States.
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An exception was Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China.
Academic text (1991) -
The very cause upon which our founding fathers built this great nation!
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One of the founding fathers wrote it.
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The founding fathers of this country were well aware of this.
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Take from it what you will, but the founding fathers warned us.
Blog text (4) -
Governor Morris was a founding father and he wrote, "religion is the only solid basis of good morals."
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Doctor Kami Kruma, Ghana's founding father and its first president, delivered a speech to the United Nations.
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We're standing here in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, the birthplace of freedom, where the founding fathers authored the Declaration of Independence.
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A descendant of Jean Baptiste Thaumure, one of the town's founding fathers, Ron grew up in this area.
Academic text (2004)
Synonyms
458
3.9
A person who starts an organization like a company or charity
230
1.0
A person who helped start something important, like a country
35
5.1
A person from older generations who helped start your family or its traditions
A person who starts a company or organization with others
A person who started an idea or tradition that others follow
Antonyms
How Important
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense ‘a man who establishes an institution’ is directly derivable from combining 'founding' (establishing) with 'father' (originator), so the overall meaning follows straightforward compositional logic. This noun+noun figurative pattern is common cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Founding father comes from the image of a parent who starts and cares for a family: founding means starting something and father is the leader who protects it. So founding father means 'a man who starts and shapes an important country, organization, or institution'.