Word Type
Family can be an adjective or a noun.
family used as an adjective:
- Suitable for children and adults.
"It's not good for a date, it's a family restaurant." - Conservative, traditonal.
"The cultural struggle is for the survival of family values against all manner of atheistic amorality." - Homosexual.
"I knew he was family when I first met him."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
family used as a noun:
- A father, mother and their sons and daughters; also called nuclear family.
"Her nuclear family was very small." - A group of people related by blood, marriage, law, or custom.
- A kin, tribe; also called extended family.
- A rank in the classification of organisms, below order and above genus; a taxon at that rank.
"Magnolias belong to the family Magnoliaceae." - A group of people who live together.
"This is my fraternity family at the university." - A group of people similar to related by blood, marriage, law, or custom.
"Our company is one big happy family." - Collectively, people who are members of one's intimate social group.
"They treated me like family." - Any group or aggregation of things classed together as kindred or related from possessing in common characteristics which distinguish them from other things of the same order.
- A group of instrument having the same basic method of tone production.
"the brass family" - A group of languages believed to have descended from the same ancestral language.
"the Indo-European language family" -
"The dog was kept as a family pet."
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is family?
- Adjective usage: It's not good for a date, it's a family restaurant.
- Adjective usage: Some animated movies are not just for kids, they are family movies.
- Adjective usage: The cultural struggle is for the survival of family values against all manner of atheistic amorality.
- Adjective usage: I knew he was family when I first met him.
- Noun usage: Her nuclear family was very small.
- Noun usage: Magnolias belong to the family Magnoliaceae.
- Noun usage: This is my fraternity family at the university.
- Noun usage: Our company is one big happy family.
- Noun usage: They treated me like family.
- Noun usage: the brass family
- Noun usage: the violin family
- Noun usage: the Indo-European language family
- Noun usage: the Afro-Asiatic language family
- Noun usage: The dog was kept as a family pet.
- Noun usage: For Apocynaceae, this type of flower is a family characteristic.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of family are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of family, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
