Kinship is the bond of belonging to the same family. A sense of kinship, kinship ties, feel a kinship with somebody.
The figurative use is the common one: feeling a kinship with a stranger means recognising something of yourself in them. In anthropology, kinship is a whole field, since who counts as family differs enormously between societies.
1nounkinshipThe bond of belonging to the same family.
“There is a strong sense of kinship in the village, where most families are related.”
kinship is a bond.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵenh₁-
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵn̥h₁yom
Proto-Germanic
*kunją — race, generation, descent
Proto-West Germanic
*kuni
Old English
cynn — kind, sort, rank
Middle English
kyn
English
kin
English, today
kinship
Built from
From kin + -ship. kin comes from Middle English kyn, from Old English cynn (“kind, sort, rank”), from Proto-West Germanic kuni, from Proto-Germanic kunją (“race, generation, descent”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵn̥h₁yom, from ǵenh₁- (“to produce”). Cognate with Scots kin (“relatives, kinfolk”), frr kinn, kenn (“gender, race, family, kinship”), Dutch kunne (“gender, sex”), Middle Low German kunne (“gender, sex, race, family, lineage”), Danish køn (“gender, sex”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk kjønn (“gender, sex”), Swedish kön (“gender, sex”), Faroese and Icelandic kyn (“gender”), Finnish kunnia (“honour, glory”), izh kunnia (“reputation”), and through Indo-European, with Latin genus (“kind, sort, ancestry, birth”), Ancient Greek γένος (“kind, race”), Sanskrit जनस् (“kind, race”), Albanian dhen (“(herd of) small cattle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA