Learn English – A parent who has more than one child with one or more partners: “Poly-what?”

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A polyglot is someone who can speak many languages; something that is polychromatic has many colours, and polysemy is a word or phrase with multiple meanings

If polygamy is having more than one wife or husband at the same time, but a polygynist refers only to a man who has many wives. If polyandry is having more than one husband and a polygamist is usually a man who has more than one wife at the same time.

What do you call a "multiple father" or "multiple mother", someone who has more than one child with the same partner? And what do you call a parent who has two or more children with two or more different partners?

Best Answer

Though I am disgusted at the Greek-Latin lexical miscegenation, a parent of multiple children is polyprogenitive, from the Latin prōgeniēs, 'to beget'. From The Embodied Female:

Co-wives and surrogacy exist since Biblical times. For instance, resenting the four sons her fertile sister “gave” their common husband Jacob, barren Rachel gives him her maid Bilhah as surrogate, and adopts the two sons by this union. Emotions driving these transactions are unaccounted by Freudian chains of phallocentric symbolic equations slip-sliding between baby = penis or Darwinian notions of polyprogenitive male desire to spread his sperm. Neither can egg-exchange be entirely construed by Kleinian gynaecratic accounts of reparative urges to undo unconscious phantasies of raiding the archaic mother's envied fertile body for the babies within.

Technically, and although it doesn't fit the poly- mold requested, a person with more than one child would be multiprogenic (or multi-progenic). (The Greek equivalent, as Janus pointed out, is polytecnic, from τέκνον meaning 'child, son'.)

Similarly, a person who has children with multiple partners, according to social scientists, practices multipartnered fertility.

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