Word.ws English Dictionary

second family

second family noun: a married man’s mistress and her children. Also the alternative letter-case form of Second Family.

Noun

second family (plural second families)

  1. a married man’s mistress and her children.
    • We have precedent for two opposite social attitudes toward second families, as they were called before legal second families through sequential marriage became so fashionable.1984, Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children
    • The children in these families often only grasped to full extent of a paterfamilias’s perfidy at his funeral, when they would discover, standing at the graveside, a previously known unknown second family, complete with second widow, grieving children and claims to the estate.2009, Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower

Proper noun capitalized: Second Family

Second Family

  1. The family of the Vice President of the United States.

Also used as

second family is also the alternative letter-case form of Second Family.

Forms of second family

pluralsecond families

Questions about second family

What does second family mean?
Second family means a married man’s mistress and her children.
What part of speech is second family?
Second family can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of second family?
The plural of second family is second families.

Words near second family in the dictionary

  1. second down
  2. second downs
  3. Second Empire
  4. second estate
  5. second families
  6. second family
  7. second fiddle
  8. second fiddles
  9. second five-eighth
  10. second five-eighths
  11. second flour

Source and license

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