Definition
nounRace; family; breed; kind.
nounPersons of the same race or family; kindred.
Sentence Examples
They are of kin to each other.
Someone should notify the next of kin.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English kyn, from Old English cynn (“kind, sort, rank”), from Proto-West Germanic *kuni, from Proto-Germanic *kunją (“race, generation, descent”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵn̥h₁yom, from *ǵenh₁- (“to produce”).
Cognate with Scots kin (“relatives, kinfolk”), North Frisian kinn, kenn (“gender, race, family, kinship”), Dutch kunne (“gender, sex”), Middle Low German kunne (“gender, sex, race, family, lineage”), Danish køn (“gender, sex”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk kjønn (“gender, sex”), Swedish kön (“gender, sex”), Faroese and Icelandic kyn (“gender”), Finnish kunnia (“honour, glory”), Ingrian kunnia (“reputation”), and through Indo-European, with Latin genus (“kind, sort, ancestry, birth”), Ancient Greek γένος (génos, “kind, race”), Sanskrit जनस् (jánas, “kind, race”), Albanian dhen (“(herd of) small cattle”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Based on the number of teeth ammonites had—nine—it's believed that their closest living kin are octopuses."
— 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, →ISBN, page 84:
"Among those who derive information related to work from personal contacts, nonkins, rather than kins, constitute the most important sources even for women."
— 2016, Saraswati Raju, Santosh Jatrana, Women Workers in Urban India, page 280:
"Such sensations, however, were too near a kin to resentment to be long guiding Fanny's soliloquies."
— 1814 May 9, [Jane Austen], chapter XIII, in Mansfield Park: […], volume III, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC, page 248:
"... and our feeling together had made us forget what-ever there'd been between us to forget about. And I ain't ever in my life felt so kin to folks. I felt kinner than I knew I was. That night, tired as I was, I walked[…]"
— 1914, Zona Gale, Neighborhood Stories, page 155:
"How serenely Earth keeps on her business! […] Yielding powers to man's hand / While he burrows in her sand, / […] How kin is she to man, who sips / Nourishment with boasting lips, / Detached, but inalienably bound /To be suckled[…]"
— 1925, Therese Kayser Lindsey, Blue Norther: Texas Poems, page 53: