English Language & Usage Asked by Leo Jiang on March 3, 2021
I want to display some hierarchical data. In math and computer science we’d use "parent" and "children", but I’m unsure if they’re considered technical terms. Are there similar words that would be understood by nearly all English speakers?
Edit:
The specific context is communities that belong to other communities. E.g. the soccer community would be a subset/child of the sports community and the opposite would be the superset/parent.
You could call your top level categories superordinates and the second-level subcategories subordinates (in this context, the natural antonym to superordinates). From Lexico:
superordinate: A thing that represents a superior order or category within a system of classification.
In your example, sports community would be the superordinate and soccer community, basketball community, etc. would be subordinates.
From an ELU perspective, you might be interested in the terms hypernym and hyponym. Again from Lexico:
hypernym: A word with a broad meaning that more specific words fall under; a superordinate. For example, color is a hypernym of red.
hyponym: A word of more specific meaning than a general or superordinate term applicable to it; contrasted with hypernym. For example, spoon is a hyponym of cutlery.
Answered by Richard Kayser on March 3, 2021
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