say it: puh-TUR-ni-tee
paternity is a noun meaning "the state of being a father". It carries 3 recorded senses.
the kinship relation between an offspring and the father
the act of initiating a new idea or theory or writing
“the authorship of the theory is disputed”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for paternity come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.