underbreed

English

Etymology

Pronunciation

Audio (US): (file)

Verb

underbreed (third-person singular simple present underbreeds, present participle underbreeding, simple past and past participle underbred)

To breed insufficiently.
- 1884, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, The Asclepiad:
  Whether this political torrent is to be for good or bad for the country at large, whether it is going to breed statesmen or underbreed statesmanship, are points on which a physician need offer no opinion.
- 1948, Harold Lark Harris, Decentralization, page 24:
  It is just as hopeless to overbreed the under-cultured, as it is to underbreed the cultural.
- 1986, Harness Horse - Volume 52, Issues 9-12, page 51:
  "Some owners underbreed and lose out on making money," Gurrola said.

Noun

underbreed (plural underbreeds)

(chiefly science fiction) An inferior or subservient breed of people or sentient beings.
- 1973, Terry Carr, Richard A. Lupoff, Robert Silverberg, No Mind of Man: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction, page 122:
  Leaf felt degraded by that — hiring on, in effect, as an indentured underbreed — but what choice was there for him?
- 1995, Alan Cockrell, Tail of the Storm: Flying Missions in the First Gulf War, →ISBN, page 49:
  I had an idea who it was but called the command post and demanded the names of the underbreeds who had last piloted the jet
- 2013, Thomas E. Kennedy, Kerrigan in Copenhagen, →ISBN, page 119:
  Hi is thinking about those strange advertisements they read in the tabloid to titillate themselves, and the present in which he exists seems suddenly like some weird science fiction movie of the future in which the world is organized in a strange manner with certain people as an underbreed in which they are manipulated by economics to sell their bodies to others who live in another sphere where the repression of their carnality is required as an imagined requisite for social order.