Word.ws English Dictionary

in-group

in-group is the alternative form of ingroup.

Meaning of ingroup

Noun

ingroup (plural ingroups)

  1. The social group that one belongs to.
    • You will learn a lot about formal and informal Japanese language throughout this book. In Japanese society a distinction is made between the 'in-group' (myself, my family, my work colleagues, my friends) and the 'out-group' (my seniors, people from other families and workplaces). Politeness is an...2008, Helen Gilhooly, chapter 1, in Complete Japanese, →ISBN, page 12
    Antonyms:
    outgroup
  2. (systematics) In cladistics, the monophyletic group that includes all taxa of interest to the current study.
    • A cladistic analysis of 45 ingroup and two outgroup taxa was performed on the basis of 134 characters.2009 January 15, Martin D. Brazeau, “The braincase and jaws of a Devonian 'acanthodian' and modern gnathostome origins”, Nature Volume 457 No. 7227, doi:10.1038/nature07436
    Antonyms:
    outgroup

See all 3 meanings of ingroup

Forms of in-group

Noun
pluralin-groups
Verb
third-person singular presentin-groups
present participlein-grouping
past participlein-grouped
pastin-grouped

Questions about in-group

What is in-group the alternative form of?
In-group is the alternative form of ingroup.

Words near in-group in the dictionary

  1. in-game
  2. in-game currencies
  3. in-game currency
  4. in-goal
  5. in-goals
  6. in-group
  7. in-grouped
  8. in-grouping
  9. in-groups
  10. in-home
  11. in-hospital

Source and license

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