Word.ws English Dictionary

families

families is the plural of family.

Meaning of family

Noun

family (countable and uncountable, plural families)

  1. 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.
    1. (collective) A group of related animals, usually a mother and offspring, a mating pair or larger lineages in some species.
  2. An extended family: a group of people who are related to one another by blood or marriage.
  3. 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.
  4. (uncountable) Members of one's family collectively.
    • I have a lot of family in Australia.
  5. 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

See all 15 meanings of family

Phrases with families

25 more phrasesFewer phrases

Questions about families

What is families the plural of?
Families is the plural of family.

Words near families in the dictionary

  1. Familias
  2. familicidal
  3. familicide
  4. familicides
  5. familied
  6. families
  7. families of orientation
  8. families of procreation
  9. famililess
  10. familiocracy
  11. familiocratic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: families (page history and authors); family (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: “families.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/families. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.