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familial

adjective

Simple meaning

Related to characteristic of humanity.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

fuhmilyuhl

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US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

fəˈmɪljəl

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

adjective

  1. Of or pertaining to a human family.

  2. Of or pertaining to any grouping of things referred to as a family.

  3. taxonomy

    Pertaining to a taxon at the rank of family.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
C1 · Advanced (estimated)
Frequency
Uncommon
Typical Use
Varies by meaning

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: Of or pertaining to a human family.

Used this way, familial is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in family or home contexts.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
No strong connotation
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Where it naturally appears

  • Family/home

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use familial

  • “Children of the same familial background.”adjective

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

Pertaining

familial relationsfamilial relationshipfamilial aggregation

Other combinations

familial hypercholesterolemiafamilial incidencefamilial occurrencefamilial historyfamilial status

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Word family

Words built from the same root.

  • familynounDerived noun · specialist

    A social unit living together.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • Congenital disorder characterized by high levels of cholesterol and early development of atherosclerosis.

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.