Other forms: nephews
Your nephew is the son of your brother or sister. My nephew, a great-nephew, his nephew is at university.
The female equivalent is niece, and the pair covers the children of your siblings and, in ordinary use, of your partner's siblings too. Their child is your great-nephew or great-niece. The word is pronounced NEF-yoo in most of Britain and America, though an older British pronunciation with a v — NEV-yoo — is still heard. Note that nepotism, favouring your relatives in appointments, is built from exactly this word.
1nounnephewThe son of your brother or sister.
“Her nephew is staying for the summer.”
nephew is a relative.
Latin nepos meant grandson or nephew and comes from a Proto-Indo-European word for a descendant. Popes who appointed their nephews to office gave us nepotism, which preserves the Latin word intact inside an English one.
Proto-Indo-European
*népōts — grandchild, sister's son
Proto-Italic
*nepōts — nephew, grandson
Latin
nepos
Old French
neveu
Middle English
nevew
English, today
nephew
Built from
From Middle English nevew, neveu (“nephew, grandson”), from Old French neveu, from Latin nepos, from Proto-Italic nepōts (“nephew, grandson”), whence also French neveu, Italian nipote. Displaced or absorbed the inherited neve (“nephew, grandson, male cousin”), from Middle English neve, from Old English nefa, from Proto-West Germanic nefō, from Proto-Germanic nefô (“nephew, grandson”), whence Dutch neef, German Neffe. All ultimately from Proto-Indo-European népōts (“grandchild, sister's son”). Cognate with Serbo-Croatian nećak, Irish nia, Persian نوه. a doublet of neve. Spelt with -ph- by readaptation to nepos since the 15th century, which later triggered the with.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA