Other forms: families
Your family is the group of people you are related to, especially parents and their children. A big family, family life, my family.
In British English family often takes a plural verb — the family are away — because it is treated as a group of people; American English prefers the singular. Nuclear family means parents and children only, and extended family adds grandparents, aunts and cousins. It also means a group of related things: a family of languages, a family of plants. Note family tree, family name, and run in the family.
1nounfamilyThe group of people you are related to.~63%
“The whole family lives within about three streets.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
family is a related group.
Latin familia meant a household including its servants, from famulus, a servant — blood relation was not the defining idea at all. English narrowed it to kin over several centuries, and the older sense survives in the phrase the family firm.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁-
Latin
familia — a household
Middle English
famylye
English, today
family
From Late Middle English famylye, from Latin familia (“a household”). Displaced native Old English hīred and hād. a doublet of familia.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA