See Also: foster(dictionary)
foster(2)(dictionary)
Foster(medicine)
foster(1)(dictionary)
foster 1, verb(dictionary)
foster 2, adjective(dictionary)
Bananas Foster(recipes)
Foster, Stephen(dictionary)
Foster, Jodie(encyclopedia)
Foster's Group(finance)

ABR (health) and foster(2) (iou)


ABR (health)


Abbreviation for auditory brainstem response. See ABR test.





foster(2) (iou)



foster noun1 & adjective.
[Old English foster from Germanic base of Food + instr. suffix. In branch A.II from the adjective.]
A. noun.
I.
Food, nourishment. OE-L17.
Care, keeping, fostering. rare. ME-M19.
II.
A foster-parent; a nurse. arch. OE.
A foster-child. Formerly also, offspring. Long only Scot. ME.
b. attrib. or as adjective. (Freq. with hyphen.)
Having a specified familial relationship not by blood or adoption, but by virtue of nursing, bringing up, or care, as foster-brother, foster-daughter, foster-sister, foster-son. OE.
M. Forster My idea of happiness was to have a family...Even an adoptive or foster family would have sufficed.
Concerned with the care of orphans, or children in need of a temporary but stable Home. L19.
T. Keneally When I was twelve I went to a foster-Home, a childless couple in Connecticut.
Comb. & special collocations: foster-child a child nursed or brought up as their own by people Other than his or her biological or adoptive parents; foster-father a man who brings up a child as his own; the husband of a wet-nurse; foster-mother (a) a woman who nurses and brings up a child as her own, or on behalf of the child's natural mother; (b) an apparatus for rearing chickens hatched in an incubator; foster-nurse a nurse who brings up a child as her own.