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

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.