1 having feelings that are typical of a caring mother towards a child:
maternal love * I'm not very maternal. * She didn't have any maternal instincts.
2 connected with being a mother:
Maternal age affects the baby's survival rate. * the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy
3 [onlybeforenoun] related through the mother's side of the family:
my maternal grandfather (= my mother's father)
maternally adverb:
She behaved maternally towards her students.
comparePATERNAL
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for maternal is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is maternal a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, maternal is tagged as adjective.
Does maternal appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — maternal appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
