Other forms: kindreds
Kindred are your relatives taken together. My kindred, kindred and friends, a kindred spirit.
The noun is archaic and survives mainly in anthropology. What everybody knows is the adjective in kindred spirit, meaning somebody who thinks as you do, and that phrase has entirely outlived the word it came from.
1nounkindredYour relatives taken together.
“The old woman had outlived all her kindred and lived alone in the village.”
kindred is relatives.
Old English cynred, from cynn, kin, plus a suffix meaning a condition. The d crept in later.
Old English
*cynrēd
Middle English
kyndrede
English, today
kindred
Built from
From Middle English kyndrede, from older kynrede (“kindred”), from Old English cynrēd, cynrǣden (“kindred, family, stock”), from cynn (“kind, kin, lineage”) + -rǣden (“condition, state”). Equivalent to kin + red, see these. The -d- is epenthetic between a nasal and a liquid (as e.g. in spindle).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA