Word.ws English Dictionary

family romance

family romance noun: a romantic story about a given family.

Noun

family romance (plural family romances)

  1. A romantic story about a given family.
  2. A childhood fantasy whereby a child imagines that their real parents are in fact royalty or otherwise of high birth; (loosely), the emotional ties linking the various members of a family.
    • Every encounter with friend or foe, every clash with or submission to authority bears the perverse traces of family romance.1990, Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

Forms of family romance

pluralfamily romances

Origin of family romance

From family + romance, in psychoanalytic sense after German Familienroman.

Questions about family romance

What does family romance mean?
Family romance means a romantic story about a given family.
What part of speech is family romance?
Family romance is a noun.
What is the plural of family romance?
The plural of family romance is family romances.

Words near family romance in the dictionary

  1. family restaurant
  2. family restaurants
  3. family reunification
  4. family reunion
  5. family reunions
  6. family romance
  7. family romances
  8. family roof
  9. family roofs
  10. family room
  11. family rooms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: family romance (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: “family romance.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/family_romance. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.