1. A male parent who produces, raises, and nurtures a child or children: The father joined a parenting education program with his daughter to help him improve his parenting skills.
2. A man who creates, originates, or founds something: There are those who say that George Washington was the father of his country.
3. When capitalized, a term that is used when talking to or about a priest; especially, a Roman Catholic priest: Father is used when greeting or talking with priests in the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Catholic Church; while "Padre" is often used in the military.

Josef Fritzl, who has admitted imprisoning his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children by her, will go on trial on March 16, 2009, on charges including murder, an Austrian court said Thursday.

Fritzl, 73, has been charged by prosecutors with the murder of one of his daughter's children who died shortly after birth. He is also charged with rape, enslavement, incest, coercion, and deprivation of liberty.

1. rape: The crime of forcing an unwilling or legally incompetent person to participate in sexual intercourse.

Destructive assault, as on a city, landscape, etc.

2. enslavement: The process of making someone a slave.
3. incest: Sexual relations between people who are so closely related that their marriage is illegal or forbidden by custom; such as, with a man's daughter.
4. coercion: To force to act or to think in a certain way by use of pressure, domination, restraining, or forcibly controlling.
5. deprivation of liberty: the act of taking a person's freedom away or preventing someone from having personal freedom from servitude or confinement or oppression.