Etimology
From Late Middle English familie, from Latin familia (“a household”). Displaced native Old English hīred. Doublet of familia.
noun
family (countable and uncountable, plural families)
(countable) A group of people who are closely related to one another (by blood, marriage or adoption); kin; in particular, a set of parents and their children; an immediate family.
(countable) An extended family: a group of people who are related to one another by blood or marriage.
(countable) A nuclear family: a mother and father who are married and cohabiting and their child or children.
(uncountable) Members of one's family collectively.
(countable) A (close-knit) group of people related by blood, friendship, marriage, law, or custom, especially if they live or work together.
(uncountable) Lineage, especially honorable or noble lineage.
(countable, biology, taxonomy) A category in the classification of organisms, ranking below order and above genus; a taxon at that rank.
(countable) Any group or aggregation of things classed together as kindred or related from possessing in common characteristics which distinguish them from other things of the same order.
(set theory, countable) A collection of sets, especially of subsets of a given set.
(countable, music) A group of instruments having the same basic method of tone production.
(countable, linguistics) A group of languages believed to have descended from the same ancestral language.
Examples
Our family lives in town.
To Jane, he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused, and whose merit she had undervalued; but to her own more extensive information, he was the person, to whom the whole family were indebted for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded herself with an interest, if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just, as what Jane felt for Bingley.
Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible, deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability: […] it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.
America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 : people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.
They’re both New Yorkers coasting on their reputations, they’ve both had three marriages, neither of them can shut up when in front of a camera, and perhaps most importantly, they both want to fuck Ivanka, which-which is weird for Trump because Ivanka is in his family, and it’s weird for Giuliani because she isn’t.
The cultural struggle is for the survival of family values against all manner of atheistic amorality.
We must preserve the family unit if we want to save civilisation!
I have a lot of family in Australia.
He has a sister, but no other family.
crime family, Mafia family
This is my fraternity family at the university.
Our company is one big happy family.
[…] This is not your hallmark im Ames, Iowa. And there is “family” working there . . . no radar like gaydar, I always say.
Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about that she had not even 'family'; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family that perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more.
Synonym: familia
Magnolias belong to the family Magnoliaceae.
The closest affinities of the Jubulaceae are with the Lejeuneaceae. The two families share in common: a elaters usually 1-spiral, trumpet-shaped and fixed to the capsule valves, distally […].
Doliracetam is a drug from the racetam family.
When creating a font family, first decide whether to use all serif or all sans-serif fonts, then choose two or three fonts of that type […]
Let F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} be a family of subsets over S {\displaystyle S} .
the brass family; the violin family
Synonym: language family
the Indo-European family
the Afroasiatic family
Related words
synonyms
(relatives): flesh and blood, kin, kinfolk, fam, See Thesaurus:family
(class): Thesaurus:class
hyponyms
(relatives): nuclear family, immediate family, extended family
(computing): C family
related terms
familial
familiar, familiarity
familicide
adjective
family (not comparable)
Suitable for children and adults.
(gay slang) Homosexual.
Examples
It's not good for a date, it's a family restaurant.
Some animated movies are not just for kids, they are family movies.
This is a family restaurant, stop making out!
I knew he was family when I first met him.