family

Etymology

From Early Modern English familie (not in Middle English), from Latin familia (“a household”). Doublet of familia. Displaced native Old English hīred.

noun

1. (countable) A group of people who are closely related to one another (by blood, marriage or adoption); kin; in particular, a set of parents and their children; an immediate family.
   Our family lives in town.
   This is a family restaurant, stop making out!
   America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 ([…]): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short. 2013-06-01, “Towards the end of poverty”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 11
   They’re both New Yorkers coasting on their reputations, they’ve both had three marriages, neither of them can shut up when in front of a camera, and perhaps most importantly, they both want to fuck Ivanka, which-which is weird for Trump because Ivanka is in his family, and it’s weird for Giuliani because she isn’t. May 6 2018, “Rudy Giuliani”, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 5, episode 10, John Oliver (actor), via HBO
2. (countable) An extended family: a group of people who are related to one another by blood or marriage.
   1915, William T. Groves, A History and Genealogy of the Groves Family in America:
3. (countable) A nuclear family: a mother and father who are married and cohabiting and their child or children.
   The cultural struggle is for the survival of family values against all manner of atheistic amorality.
   We must preserve the family unit if we want to save civilisation!
4. (uncountable) Members of one's family collectively.
   I have a lot of family in Australia.
   He has a sister, but no other family.
5. (countable) A (close-knit) group of people related by blood, friendship, marriage, law, or custom, especially if they live or work together.
   crime family, Mafia family
   This is my fraternity family at the university.
   Our company is one big happy family.
   1. (gay slang) The gay community.
      […]This is not your hallmark im Ames, Iowa. And there is “family” working there . . . no radar like gaydar, I always say. July 15, 1982, Gloria Godqueen, “What's in a card”, in Bay Area Reporter, volume 12, number 28, page 7
6. (uncountable) Lineage, especially honorable or noble lineage.
7. (countable, biology, taxonomy) A category in the classification of organisms, ranking below order and above genus; a taxon at that rank.
   Magnolias belong to the family Magnoliaceae.
8. (countable) Any group or aggregation of things classed together as kindred or related from possessing in common characteristics which distinguish them from other things of the same order.
   Doliracetam is a drug from the racetam family.
   When creating a font family, first decide whether to use all serif or all sans-serif fonts, then choose two or three fonts of that type […] 2010, Gary Shelly, Jennifer Campbell, Ollie Rivers, Microsoft Expression Web 3: Complete, page 262
9. (set theory, countable) A collection of sets, especially of subsets of a given set.
   Let ℱ be a family of subsets over S.
10. (countable, music) A group of instruments having the same basic method of tone production.
    the brass family;  the violin family
11. (countable, linguistics) A group of languages believed to have descended from the same ancestral language.
    the Indo-European language family;  the Afroasiatic language family

adj

1. Suitable for children and adults.
   It's not good for a date, it's a family restaurant.
   Some animated movies are not just for kids, they are family movies.
2. (gay slang) Homosexual.
   I knew he was family when I first met him.