UPBRINGING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does upbringing mean? 

• UPBRINGING (noun)
  The noun UPBRINGING has 2 senses:

1. properties acquired during a person's formative years

2. helping someone grow up to be an accepted member of the community

  Familiarity information: UPBRINGING used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• UPBRINGING (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Properties acquired during a person's formative years

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("upbringing" is a kind of...):

heritage; inheritance (any attribute or immaterial possession that is inherited from ancestors)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "upbringing"):

breeding; education; training (the result of good upbringing (especially knowledge of correct social behavior))

nurture; raising; rearing (the properties acquired as a consequence of the way you were treated as a child)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Helping someone grow up to be an accepted member of the community

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

breeding; bringing up; fosterage; fostering; nurture; raising; rearing; upbringing

Context example:

they debated whether nature or nurture was more important

Hypernyms ("upbringing" is a kind of...):

acculturation; enculturation; socialisation; socialization (the adoption of the behavior patterns of the surrounding culture)

 Context examples 

It is not a tongue for men of sweet birth and delicate upbringing.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

So this is the upbringing that you have had, Jim—to think evil of that which you do not understand!

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A new study suggests that how empathic we are is not just a result of our upbringing and experience but also partly a result of our genes.

(Study finds that genes play a role in empathy, University of Cambridge)

Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and formed.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

“What sort of an upbringing is that?”

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Mayhap he had cause to be bitter against me, for his land was given to the abbey for my upbringing.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Do you know that all these were squeezed out of your dying father by greedy priests, to pay for your upbringing in the cloisters?

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“She was at much pains at my upbringing, and, by my soul! I will uphold the curve of her eyelashes, for it tickleth my very heart-root to think of her. But who is here?”

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A monkish upbringing, one year in the world after the age of twenty, and then a free selection one way or the other—it was a strange course which had been marked out for him.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

By our Lady! and withouten disrespect, quoth Terlake, it is in my mind that her lady-mother is more fitted to lead a company to a storming than to have the upbringing of this tender and milk-white maid.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)