Word.ws English Dictionary

polyfamily

polyfamily noun: a group of people in a polyamorous relationship, who consider each other as family.

Noun

polyfamily (plural polyfamilies)

  1. A group of people in a polyamorous relationship, who consider each other as family.
    • Group marriage must be contrasted with polyfamilies, which is similar to group marriage but where some members may not considered themselves married to all other members.2008, Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen, Polygamy: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, Bloomsbury Academic, →ISBN, page 13
    • Interestingly, despite the percentages above illustrating that many polyfamilies in the Polyamory Survey had children or wanted children, only approximately 30 percent of survey respondents had told their children about their poly relationships or their desire to be in one...2010, Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, Border Sexualities, Border Families in Schools, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, →ISBN, page 172
  2. Such a group, together with children of members of the group.
    • When a child is born into a polyfamily, he or she has legal parents and nonlegal parents.2008, Brette Sember, Unmarried with Children: The Complete Guide for Unmarried Families, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN
    • Some adults in the research who had grown up in polyfamilies and who had learned to lie at school believed that the positives they had gained from being raised in such closeted families far outweighed any negatives such as lying.2010, Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, Polyfamilies Go to School, chapter 18 of Understanding Non-Monogamies, ed. Meg Barker, Darren Langdridge; Routledge, page 185

Forms of polyfamily

pluralpolyfamilies

Origin of polyfamily

From poly- + family.

Questions about polyfamily

What does polyfamily mean?
Polyfamily means a group of people in a polyamorous relationship, who consider each other as family.
What part of speech is polyfamily?
Polyfamily is a noun.
What is the plural of polyfamily?
The plural of polyfamily is polyfamilies.

Words near polyfamily in the dictionary

  1. polyextremophiles
  2. polyextremophilic
  3. polyextremotolerant
  4. polyfactorial
  5. polyfamilies
  6. polyfamily
  7. polyfascicular
  8. polyfection
  9. polyfections
  10. polyferredoxin
  11. polyferredoxins

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polyfamily (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-polyfamily.wav.

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