Word.ws English Dictionary

word family

word family noun: a set of etymologically related words consisting of a single word with its inflections and derivations, such as walk, walked, walks, walking, walkings, walker, walkers, walkies, walkable, walkathon.

Noun

word family (plural word families)

  1. (language teaching) A set of etymologically related words consisting of a single word with its inflections and derivations, such as walk, walked, walks, walking, walkings, walker, walkers, walkies, walkable, walkathon.
    • Furthermore, the current study goes beyond previous wordlist development by contributing accompanying pedagogical lists containing word associations (i.e. collocations) and word families.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary...

Forms of word family

pluralword families

Questions about word family

What does word family mean?
Word family means a set of etymologically related words consisting of a single word with its inflections and derivations, such as walk, walked, walks, walking, walkings, walker, walkers, walkies, walkable, walkathon.
What part of speech is word family?
Word family is a noun.
What is the plural of word family?
The plural of word family is word families.

Words near word family in the dictionary

  1. word count
  2. word counts
  3. word divider
  4. word dividers
  5. word families
  6. word family
  7. word finder
  8. word for word
  9. word form
  10. word formation
  11. word formations

Source and license

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