Other forms: cousins
A cousin is the child of your uncle or aunt. My cousin, first cousins, a distant cousin.
English is unusually vague here compared with many languages: cousin covers male and female, older and younger, and both sides of the family, with no distinction at all. The precision comes from numbers instead — first cousin, second cousin, first cousin once removed — where the number is the generations back to the shared ancestor and removed counts generations of difference. Almost nobody uses those correctly, which is why distant cousin does so much work. Figuratively, a cousin is a closely related thing: the two languages are cousins.
1nouncousinThe child of your uncle or aunt.
“My cousin lives about an hour away.”
2nouncloselyA closely related person or thing.
“Dutch and German are close cousins.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cousin is a family relation.
Cousin once covered almost any relative at all. Middle English cosyn could mean a nephew, a grandchild, a godparent, or simply a kinsman, and narrowing it to the child of an aunt or uncle is a late tidying-up.
Middle English
cosyn
English, today
cousin
Built from
From Middle English cosyn. The noun is derived from Middle English cosin, cosine, cosyn (“blood relative, kinsman or kinswoman; any relative; nephew or niece; first cousin; grandson or granddaughter; descendant; godchild or godparent, or a relative of a godchild or godparent; (figurative) closely related or similar thing”)coosin, cosen, coseyn, cosigne, cosing, cossen, cossin, cossigne, cossine, cossyn, cossyne, cosyne, cosynne, cousin, cousine, cousyn, cozyn, cusin, cusine, cussyn, cusyn, kosen, kosin, kosyn, and then:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA