Word.ws English Dictionary

cross-sibling

cross-sibling noun: an opposite-sex sibling or parallel cousin.

Noun

cross-sibling (plural cross-siblings)

  1. An opposite-sex sibling or parallel cousin.
    • Ifaluk society even forbids smoking in the presence of one's cross-siblings, because it involves movements and gestures with sexual connotations.1998, Charles William Nuckolls, Culture: A Problem That Cannot Be Solved, page 65
  2. (neologism) The half-sibling of one's half-sibling; a person with whom one shares a half-sibling, but no parents.
    • As cross-siblings we're not in any way bound to each other; our relationship is optional, we don't have to get on – we just do.2013 December 28, Janelle Butterfield, “I bonded with my cross-sister – we share half-brothers”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 29 Dec 2013

Forms of cross-sibling

pluralcross-siblings

Origin of cross-sibling

From cross- + sibling.

Questions about cross-sibling

What does cross-sibling mean?
Cross-sibling means an opposite-sex sibling or parallel cousin.
What part of speech is cross-sibling?
Cross-sibling is a noun.
What is the plural of cross-sibling?
The plural of cross-sibling is cross-siblings.

Words near cross-sibling in the dictionary

  1. cross-server
  2. cross-sex
  3. cross-shaped
  4. cross-shot
  5. cross-shots
  6. cross-sibling
  7. cross-siblings
  8. cross-sill
  9. cross-sills
  10. cross-site
  11. cross-site request forgeries

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cross-sibling (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cross-sibling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cross-sibling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.